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In the morning of August 31, Egyptian journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy received an email from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), informing him that it had...

The post International solidarity works: Hossam el-Hamalawy wins entry to Canada first appeared on Spring.

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Lynas, Rare Earths and the War Machine Inside the recent militarised extrtactivism webinar co-hosted by YLNM and AidWatch

Photo: Protest against Lynas-United States deal for military supplies of rare earths on July 6. Credit: Malaysian Protest 4 Palestine

Lynas Rare Earths likes to present itself as a green technology company, as a clean supplier of the minerals the world needs for the energy transition. Sit with the evidence for an hour, as everyone who joined our recent webinar did, and that story falls apart.

What emerges instead is a company kept alive for close to two decades by Japanese state money, subsidised by the Pentagon and the Australian Government, dumping radioactive waste on a Malaysian coastal community, and now sitting inside the supply chain that arms Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The Lynas Rare Earths: Militarised Extractivism in Action webinar was co-hosted by AidWatch and Yes to Life No to Mining (YLNM). It’s the first in a webinar series which builds on a YLNM position paper published at the end of last year, Militarism is Extraction: From Mines to Missiles which builds on.

AidWatch Chair, Liz Downes opened the webinar and set out why Lynas matters and how deep the Pentagon money runs, before handing over to Shigeru Tanaka, Executive Director, Pacific Asia Resource Center (PARC, Japan), Farwina Faroque, Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS), Malaysia, and AidWatch’s Lee Tan, who has been organising against Lynas since 2011.

Here’s what they told us.

What Lynas actually is

Liz Downes, AidWatch Chair, opened by laying out exactly what Lynas is: an Australian-owned company that mines rare earths at Mount Weld in Western Australia and, since 2012–13, processes them at the Lynas Advanced Materials Plant (LAMP) in Kuantan, Malaysia. A long-promised processing plant at Kalgoorlie remains unreliable at best due to its limited water supply. Lynas moved the hazardous separation stage of production offshore quite deliberately: Australia’s environmental standards were expensive and inconvenient, Malaysia’s were not.

The company took advantage of lower costs and more permissive waste rules to do in Kuantan what it did not want to do at home. The result is millions of tonnes of hazardous waste, including a radioactive stream from the water-leach purification process.

Lynas has spent years pushing Malaysia to accept a permanent radioactive waste dump on flood and fire-prone coastal peatland, a proposal that falls well below international standards for managing low-level radioactive waste. And it matters well beyond Malaysia’s borders, because LAMP is currently the only commercial-scale producer of separated rare earth oxides outside China.

The Pentagon pipeline

Liz then walked us through how a single fact – that Lynas is currently the only ‘game’ outside China, is exactly why the US Department of War (formerly Defense) has poured so much money into the company under both the Biden and Trump administrations. Funding for a heavy rare earth separation plant in Texas has gone nowhere, but the money hasn’t disappeared: it has flowed instead into extracting heavy and light rare earths through the Malaysian plant, backed by a four-year supply agreement guaranteeing the Pentagon a framework for rare earth oxides. In March this year alone, Lynas picked up another US$96 million.

The US still imports more than 70% of its rare earths from China, but it is racing to change that as it prepares for confrontation with China rather than cooperation. Lynas is now the world’s biggest rare earth miner and the only commercial-scale processor outside China, which makes its output “critical” to Washington’s plans. This is not for green technology, but for the expanding military capabilities, producing more deadly weapons for profit, and furnishing war and genocide around the world.

Until 2025, Lynas mostly produced light rare earths like neodymium and praseodymium – elements it could plausibly describe as feeding green technology. Pentagon money is now pushing it to separate dysprosium, terbium and samarium too — elements essential for the durable magnets in high-precision weapons, with yet more to come for production of high-powered lasers, night vision, fighter jet engines, missile guidance, nuclear reactor control systems, radiation shielding and nuclear submarines.

Australia has also funded Lynas through trade agreements – part of its bid to be Washington’s key ally in militarising the Pacific – and Japan’s investment runs deeper still.

Liz traced the same supply chain forward to its disastrous end point: local environmental damage in Kuantan, regional militarisation of the Pacific through military exercises like RIMPAC and a wave of “defence critical minerals” projects, and the involuntary enlistment of countries like Malaysia, in a supply chain feeding the military-industrial complex – including, as Liz laid out with sobering figures, the weapons pipeline into Gaza.

Two decades of Japanese rescue

Shigeru Tanaka, Executive Director with the Pacific Asia Resource Center in Japan, walked us through a history that reframes Lynas as far more than an Australian company operating in Malaysia.

Lynas announced its plan in 2007 and nearly went bankrupt within a year, as the global financial crisis dried up capital and interest rates climbed. By 2009 the company had around $7 million in the bank against monthly overheads in the millions, Lynas was genuinely on the edge of collapse. A Chinese state-owned company offered to buy a 51.6% stake for $252 million plus a further $252 million loan, effectively $500 million in total. The Australian government blocked the deal outright, unwilling to see a Chinese-controlled monopoly on rare earths.

Japan stepped in instead, but not out of goodwill. In September 2010, a collision between a Chinese fishing vessel and Japanese coast guard boats near the tiny island of Senkaku, a contested territory escalated into a diplomatic crisis, and China responded by halting rare earth exports to Japan. With China holding a monopoly on these elements, the shock sent Japan into overdrive to secure an alternative. The state-owned Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC, since renamed the Japan Organization for Metal Security) and trading house Sojitz co-invested $250 million for 30% of LAMP’s output. This is half of what China had originally offered, but enough to keep Lynas alive.

Japan came back again in 2013–14, when the rare earth price bubble collapsed as a result of the WTO ruling which stopped China from placing a quota and restricts its rare earth export. WhenLynas’s stock and investment base started falling away, a ten-year extension on loan repayments and reduced interest rates were quickly granted. It came back a third time in 2018–19, blocking a hostile takeover that would actually have suited Japanese lenders financially, apparently preferring to keep Lynas under its thumb rather than cash out. And in 2023, as Lynas moved into heavy rare earth elements, JOGMEC and Sojitz added a further $200 million.

Three rescues, one pattern. As Shigeru put it, Japan isn’t only importing the materials — it is exporting the harm, and allowing Malaysia to absorb it, all under the rhetoric of “mineral security” and anti-China positioning.

 

From Kuantan to Gaza

Farwina Faroque, secretary general of BDS Malaysia, drew the line from the soils of Kuantan to the rubble of Gaza.

BDS was founded in July 2005 by 170 Palestinian civil society organisations, calling for an end to military occupation and colonisation, full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of return under UN Resolution 194.

Boycotts work. Intel halted construction of a US$25 billion plant in Israel in 2024 under sustained pressure, and Puma finally dropped its sponsorship of the Israeli Football Association. In Malaysia, direct action has blocked shipments too, including a container belonging to Israeli shipping giant ZIM at the Thai border in 2024, and just this past month, a Maersk container linked to weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.

Lynas sits inside this picture as a critical part of the US war machine. The Pentagon’s funding – including the Texas contracts, the 2022 US$120 million agreement, and the US$96 million framework locked in this March – exists to guarantee rare earth oxides for weapons production.

Following Lynas’s mineral supply chain to the end, means following it toward Gaza: the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute puts US military aid to Israel and regional operations at US$22.7 billion in the year after October 2023 alone, including more than 50,000 tonnes of weapons shipped, and half a billion dollars annually for missile defence and F-35 jets,(aircraft that depend heavily on rare earth magnets). US officials have received more than 500 internal reports documenting these weapons being used to commit atrocities in Gaza, and taken no action to stop the flow. Journalists and human rights organisations, including Al Jazeera, have repeatedly found serial numbers and manufacturing stamps from US-made munitions in the rubble of schools, hospitals and designated safe zones in Gaza.

BDS Malaysia has built an unprecedented coalition around this, joining with Malaysian Protest for Palestine, Greenpeace Malaysia and Sahabat Alam Malaysia to bring petitions and street protest directly to parliament, to name and shame the politicians and corporate enablers who put foreign defence contracts ahead of human lives.

It has worked: the campaign forced a parliamentary select committee review, and rattled Lynas into issuing a sanitised statement claiming the US$96 million contract was merely “research and development” for permanent magnet production. Farwina wasn’t buying it. Everyone knows where those magnets end up: fighter jets and guided missiles. The contradiction cuts deep in a country whose government publicly champions Palestinian rights while its rare earths flow to the Pentagon.

The ground truth in Kuantan

Lee Tan has been part of the Stop Lynas campaign for more than 20 years, and her section of the webinar made the human and ecological cost impossible to look away from.

Rare earths are the “spices and vitamins” of modern industry: only tiny amounts are needed in almost every piece of electronics we touch, from smartphone touchscreens to laptops. Lynas has marketed itself in Malaysia as exactly that: a green raw-materials supplier. But separating these elements requires highly concentrated acids at temperatures around 600 degrees, and it generates enormous volumes of radioactive and hazardous wastes. This is precisely why almost all rare earth processing happens in the Global South, where regulation is weakest and resistance hardest, rather than in wealthy countries that can actually afford to manage the waste safely. Lynas, for its trouble, enjoyed twelve years of tax-free status in Malaysia as a “pioneer” in green technology.

The Kuantan site was once a pristine tropical peat and mangrove forest before Lynas cleared it in 2011. Waste retention ponds now sit where a peat forest used to be, and the company’s proposed “permanent” radioactive waste facility sits on a flood-prone peat swamp next to it. This is an engineering and hydrogeological absurdity, given that the thorium and uranium in Lynas’s waste stream have half-lives of roughly 14 billion and 4 billion years respectively. This waste is, in any meaningful sense, permanently hazardous.

Malaysia’s 2018 change of government briefly opened a path to end this. A review found that Lynas’s original operating licence required it to remove its radioactive waste from Malaysia unless a genuinely safe storage site could be found. A wet, low-lying peat swamp plainly isn’t one. Enforcing that clause could have shut Lynas down. Instead, incoming Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, a long-time ally of Japan, and the same figure behind an earlier radioactive contamination case involving Mitsubishi’s Asian Rare Earth plant, travelled to Japan and personally overturned his own environment minister’s ruling. Under Japanese pressure, the plant kept running.

The double standard doesn’t stop there.

In Western Australia, community objection and a state regulatory requirement (secured partly through AidWatch submissions backed by expert Professor Gavin Mudd and Lee Tan) forced Lynas to remove radioactive waste from its Kalgoorlie site within 24 months, taking it back to Mount Weld mine under stricter Australian radioactive waste management requirements.

Malaysia has no equivalent requirement, and its safety threshold is dramatically weaker: the International Atomic Energy Agency’s benchmark for thorium and uranium is 1 becquerel per gram, but Malaysia has adopted a threshold 100 times more permissive, meaning Lynas’s radioactive waste often isn’t even classified as radioactive under Malaysian law.

Photographs shown during the webinar documented waste stored under nothing more than garbage-bag-grade plastic, repeatedly flooded, while posters and glossy picture books were distributed trying to convince local residents that it was safe to keep swimming downstream at the estuary. Soil sampling by Professor Yoshihiko Wada, a Japanese researcher found dramatic increases in toxic elements and heavy metals in sediment samples nearby including a two fold increase in thorium at the estuary. Local fishermen in this traditionally significant fishing and shellfish area strongly object, Lee said, but face real political pressure to stay quiet.

What comes next

The Q&A drew the threads together. 

Malaysia’s parliamentary select committee inquiry which was reopened this year with new evidence about the Pentagon deal, largely thanks to work led by Greenpeace Malaysia, Sahabat Alam Malaysia and Malaysian Protest for Palestine, has yet to report back, a month after a special hearing. There’s real legal and political leverage here: Malaysia’s foreign policy is explicitly pro-Palestinian, and Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has publicly positioned himself as a defender of Palestinian rights while his country’s rare earths help supply the Pentagon.

Shigeru pointed to the Rarotonga and Bangkok Treaties, which establish nuclear-free zones across the Pacific and Southeast Asia and to which both Australia and Malaysia are signatories. These are  treaties that a properly classified nuclear waste dump would plainly violate, if only the waste were honestly called what it is.

He also flagged a structural obstacle that campaigners can’t ignore: Malaysia, Australia and Japan are all parties to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), whose investor-state dispute mechanisms (SDS) could let Lynas sue Malaysia for lost profits even if the government moved to shut the plant down. Stopping Lynas, in other words, means confronting these investment treaties too.

Speakers closed by underlining the value of exactly the kind of cross-border organising this webinar represents:

• • BDS Malaysia’s own networks, for instance, learned about Israeli navy participation in RIMPAC exercises and about vessels to target for blockade through contacts as far away as Hawaii. 
  • Lee is now working on a briefing paper to help connect the Stop Lynas campaign with peace movements, Palestinian rights groups and organisations like Friends of the Earth Australia. 
  • Liz closed the session by placing Lynas inside AidWatch’s wider work: joining the dots between Australia’s critical minerals policy, the money pouring into mining expansion across Aboriginal lands, Australia’s deepening role in Pacific militarisation through AUKUS and a growing web of regional defence agreements, and the way aid dollars increasingly underwrite infrastructure that feeds the same military-industrial complex. Liz also flagged an upcoming look at the minerals race behind AI and defence technology.

Rare earths aren’t rare, and this story isn’t over. If it feels like a lot to take in, that’s because it is, but as one of our speakers put it, you don’t need to be a scientist or a lawyer to do something.

Get informed, share what you’ve learned, and get active in whatever way is open to you, including:

– Follow website and social media updates from the various organisations that speakers are connected with (links in email above);

– Join up to AidWatch’s mailing list for updates or join as a member (see links below);

– Sign up to receive Yes to Life No to Mining’s newsletter that shares stories of how people around the world are resisting mining and forging alternative futures!

Watch this space for the recording, the position paper behind this series, and further webinars in our militarised extractivism series.

The post Lynas, Rare Earths and the War Machine appeared first on Yes to Life No to Mining.

Headline News:

• “Rooftop Solar Meets 99.9% Of South Australia Grid Demand” • South Australia’s rooftop solar pushed electricity demand from conventional generation to a record winter low. The Australian Energy Market Operator said rooftop solar met 99.9% of SA’s electricity demand at 1.30 pm, August 31, reducing conventional demand to 2 MW. [Energy Magazine]

Rooftop solar (Ellen Whisk, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped)

• “Von Der Leyen Says Europe Must Prepare For A New Era Of Simultaneous Disasters” • European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned that the EU must adapt its civil protection systems to a world of more frequent, simultaneous, and severe emergencies after a European wildfire season stressed national firefighting services badly. [Euronews]
• “Europe On Track For Record Wind Year” • Europe is on track for a record year for wind installations after adding 8.8 GW of new capacity in the first half of 2026, up 30% on the first half of 2025. WindEurope said it now expects Europe to install 24 GW of new wind capacity by the end of 2026 after high installation activity over the summer. [reNews]
• “China’s Solar Power Capacity Overtakes Coal For First Time” • China’s solar power capacity exceeded coal-fired capacity for the first time, marking a milestone in the country’s transition toward cleaner energy, official data showed. Solar capacity reached 1,286 GW at the end of July, edging past coal-fired capacity of 1,285 GW, Xinhua reported. [A News]
• “Trump’s Venezuela Oil Deal May Have No Immediate Impact On US Gas Prices” • President Donald Trump announced the US reached a deal to extract tens of billions of barrels of Venezuelan crude to replenish America’s depleting strategic oil reserves and reduce. Experts say it will be years before the oil can be captured, however, providing no quick relief. [ABC News]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

Possoli Canyon, Salla

September brings major international events, restoration season draws towards its end, and new book on pastoralism. Fisheries continue with traps and traditional dip netting.

Autumn is here and in fisheries traps are in lake Onkamo and later towards October cleaning of spawning sites of endangered whitefish will continue on Koitajoki river. We will participate in the Low Impact Fishers of Europe summit in Rome in early September, where Captain Karoliina will lead efforts to convey messages from northern freshwater harvests and culture. We also participated in August in river Tornio on the cultural fishery of dip netting at Kukkolankoski which has been recognized in recent years as a cultural heritage. This was the site of the 2018 Festival of Northern Fishing Traditions.

Dip netting for whitefish, Kukkolankoski

In rewilding and restoration August and early September are devoted to the continued work on Koitajoki and Arctic Circle peatlands. Possoli canyon from Salla, Eastern Lapland marks a major ecological corridor close to the national park at the borderlands as a new site. Also in Salla, a major peatland restoration effort will commence in Autumn in the Koutelo river catchment. New sites will be added in the Autumn.

Possoli River, Salla

Pacific Tour will commence in early September 2026. Delegations will catch up with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – IPCC events in Sri Lanka, then visits to the restoration sites in Aotearoa, New Zealand will follow, and onwards to Pacific sites on the western coast and areas of Canada. The tour will culminate in late September and early October in a large workshop in Canada on questions of Circumpolar simultaneous peatlands work and Pacific wetlands restoration. More on that later in September.

Sea eagle

In other international news, a new book with Snowchange nomadic case study has been released, titled “Pastoralist Voices from the Territories: Stories of Governance, Care, and Resilience“. Pastoralists speak directly about their relationships with land, water, animals and community. These stories illuminate the governance systems, cultural practices and everyday acts of care through which pastoral communities sustain their territories. Together, they reveal both the resilience of pastoral ways of life and the pressures communities face from land conversion, climate change, insecure tenure and exclusionary policies. The whole book can be downloaded here.

Pacific Coast of Canada, 2025

Dear friends,

As the 2026 legislative session comes to an end on August 31, we write to share some important updates. 
Dear Friends,

On August 20, 2026, the Water Board released a final update to the Bay-Delta Plan, a critical rulemaking for ensuring: water quality, river flows and ecosystem protections for the state’s largest and most endangered estuary and watershed. Included in the final draft is the Board’s consideration of the inequitable and deceptive Voluntary Agreements. 

The Board will be voting on whether to adopt the final draft of the Bay-Delta Plan and VAs, and we need your help! 

Join us on October 28 and/or 29 to raise your voice in opposition to the final draft plan. 

This is your final opportunity to voice opposition to the plan, which would be devastating to Tribes, environmental justice communities, and the Bay-Delta ecosystem.

Water Board Public Notice: https://content.govdelivery.com/attachments/CAWRCB/2026/08/20/file_attachments/3753028/notice-2026finaldrftbdp.pdf

How You Can Participate:

The State Water Board will be voting on whether to adopt the final Bay-Delta Plan and Voluntary Agreements. This is your final opportunity to voice opposition to the plan, which would be devastating to Tribes, environmental justice communities, and the Bay-Delta ecosystem.

• When: October 28-29, 2026 and continuing on October 30, 2026, if necessary
• Time: Hearing starts at 9:00 am each day
• In-Person Location: Joe Serna Jr. CalEPA Building, Coastal Hearing Room 
• Address: 1001 I Street, Second Floor, Sacramento, CA 95814

How To Make A Public Comment:

• If you’d like to make a public comment, in person or virtually, please complete a Speaker Card.
• Virtual Speaking Option: If you plan to participate virtually and would like to speak, please complete a Speaker Card. The Clerk to the Board will email you one business day before the hearing with the information needed to join the meeting.

Public comments are limited to 3 minutes. You can use our Bay-Delta Plan One-Pager to help draft a public comment explaining how the proposed final Bay-Delta Plan would negatively impact your family and community, business or organization, environment, and economic interests. 

Have You Commented In The Past?

The final Phase 2 report of the Sacramento/Delta Updates to the Bay-Delta Plan is posted here. 

If you previously commented and are interested in seeing responses to your comment :

• Click here and search your first and last name
• After finding it, record your “Letter number” on the left side column
• Then click here and scroll down to “Volume 3: Responses to Comments” 
• Continue scrolling down to “4. Responses to Comments Tables”
• Lastly, click on the indexed link that includes your letter number

If you are interested in joining a Bay-Delta Plan Public Comment Training, stay tuned for more information to come!

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Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and the second-largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide (CO2).

Methane traps heat in the atmosphere more efficiently than CO2, but has a significantly shorter lifespan, fading after just a few decades.

Therefore, reducing emissions of methane – a gas primarily produced by agriculture, fossil fuels and waste management – is a powerful option for limiting global warming in the near-term.

Yet climate strategies and models often only focus on CO2, or combine all greenhouse gases into one metric known as “CO2 equivalent”.

The latter approach makes reducing methane emissions dependent on modelling choices and assumptions about the “equivalence” of methane and CO2.

It hides the opportunities and challenges linked to methane’s high warming and short lifetime.

In a new study, published in Communications Earth & Environment, we offer a different perspective that “decouples” CO2 and methane reduction and takes global warming limits as a starting point for determining the required level of methane cuts. 

We show that, even under the most ambitious existing national net-zero targets, an absence of methane reduction leads to peak warming that exceeds 1.85C above pre-industrial levels. 

The study highlights that, to limit peak warming to well-below 2C, net-zero CO2 targets must be complemented by stringent methane emissions cuts.

CO2 equivalent 

How much methane corresponds to one tonne of CO2?

The question is as difficult to answer as: ‘how much spaghetti equals a chicken?’ You could compare the two meals according to their calories, protein content or cost. Each metric can be convenient, but is only valid for that specific comparison – no amount of spaghetti is the same as a chicken. 

The same is true for the conversion of emissions of methane and other gases to CO2-equivalent emissions. It can be convenient, as it allows different gases to be compared or combined into a single number. This is why the metric is used in climate targets or evaluating the effectiveness of different mitigation options. 

But, because methane and CO2 have different atmospheric lifetimes and warming properties, any conversion is only valid for a chosen time horizon and a chosen baseline.

Depending on the assumptions baked into calculations, methane mitigation can either appear as an immediate priority or framed as almost unnecessary.

There are a number of metrics that scientists use to convert greenhouse gases – whether methane, hydrofluorocarbons or nitrous oxide – into CO2-equivalent emissions:

• “GWP20” measures how much heat a greenhouse gas traps in the atmosphere over a 20-year period, relative to CO2. It emphasises urgent methane mitigation but has been criticised for its implicit discounting of future damages.
• “GWP100” looks at a 100-year timeline. It gives more weight to long-term warming and is used in “integrated assessment models” (IAMs) used by scientists, national emission reporting to the UN and by the GHG Protocol used by companies.
• “GWP*” considers the rate of emissions, rather than warming over a fixed time horizon. Under GWP*, very limited methane reductions bring CO2-equivalent emissions to zero, meaning remaining methane emissions can be designated as causing “no additional warming”. (This interpretation remains controversial as it assumes the continuation of historical levels of warming.)

IAMs are the tools used to generate future emissions scenarios. Because they combine CO2 and methane emissions, the impact of methane emission cuts alone is difficult to isolate in existing emission scenarios.

IAM-generated scenarios also assume mitigation decisions driven by costs. Combinations of CO2 and methane emission pathways that are not purely cost-effective are, therefore, not represented, even though climate policy is messy and emission pathways are rarely cost-effective in the real world.

Only a few countries – including Japan, Mexico and South Korea – specify methane mitigation targets.

A different approach

In our study, we separate CO2 and methane emissions and treat them as independent. 

Instead of choosing a conversion method, we suggest that states and organisations set a limit on peak global warming first, then, based on their existing net-zero targets, determine the minimum compatible methane reduction target. 

Companies and countries around the world have set net-zero targets focused on CO2, as well as those that include all greenhouse gases. As a result, our research looks at the necessary methane reductions for both types of goal. We consider scenarios where companies or countries deliver linear – in other words, steady – emissions reductions to reach net-zero.

Using a simple climate model, we systematically combined methane and CO2 (or greenhouse gas) mitigation pathways starting in 2025 and calculated peak warming. 

The figure below shows how peak warming depends on both the year of reaching net-zero CO2 and the level of methane cuts.

Peak global warming relative to 1850-1900 reached until 2100 (50% likelihood), for combinations of the year of global net-zero CO2 emissions (x-axis) and the change in global methane (CH4) emissions between 2020 and that year (y-axis), assuming linear trajectories. Black lines are contours of equal peak warming. The three bars on the right show independent estimates of where CH4 emissions could or would land on the same vertical scale: CH4 mitigation available at no net cost (IEA, red), the 2030 mitigation potential (Global methane status report, orange), and the current legislation scenario for 2050 (Global methane status report, purple). Adapted from Weber et al. (2026).

The blue arrows in the figure show that to limit warming to 1.7C under a 2050 net-zero CO2 scenario, methane emissions would need to fall by at least 69% by 2050, relative to 2020. 

Our research also finds that, if an organisation or country’s 2050 net zero-target covers all greenhouse gases, its methane emissions would need to fall by 63% instead.

However, under current policies, methane emissions are expected to increase by around 20% by 2050, relative to 2020. We find that this pathway would result in peak warming above 2C by 2050 – even if global CO2 emissions were to reach net-zero by that date (see purple bar on the right-hand side of the figure above). 

The figure also shows how, if methane emissions remained at 2020 levels and net-zero CO2 was delivered by 2040 or later, warming would exceed 1.85C. This level of warming is above what has been argued as consistent with the Paris Agreement’s “well-below” 2C limit.

Conversely, cutting methane emissions by around one-third – in line with the Global Methane Pledge target for 2030 – could reduce peak warming by 0.15C, of which 0.05C could be delivered by interventions that come at no net cost. These are shown by the orange and red bars, respectively, on the figure above.

The table below highlights the minimum compatible methane cuts for three different peak warming levels and net-zero CO2 or greenhouse-gas emission targets.

Peak warmingYear of net-zero CO2 emissionsYear of net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions2050206021002050206021001.7C-69%––-63%––1.8C-32%-56%–-11%-47%–2C+8%-8%-83%>50%+33%-78%

Minimum methane emission reductions between 2020 and the year of net-zero emissions, consistent with peak warming of 1.7C, 1.8C, and 2.0C at 50% likelihood, assuming linear emission trajectories. For some net-zero targets and peak warming levels, there are no compatible methane mitigation targets (indicated by “–”).

.caption-fix{ font-size: 16px; font-family: 'PT Sans', sans-serif; font-weight: 400; text-align: start; color: #444444; max-width: min(765px, calc(100% - (2rem * 2))); margin: 0 auto } Remaining carbon budget

The global carbon budget refers to the amount of cumulative CO2 emissions allowable while still meeting a particular global warming threshold.

The 2021 climate science report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a 2023 Nature study estimated that, by 2025, the remaining carbon budget for holding warming to 2C would be around 1,000-1,150bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2). 

We find that these estimates are founded on the assumption of methane reductions of 27-35% by 2050, relative to a 2020 baseline. (A 2024 Communications Earth & Environment study reached similar conclusions.) 

Under the GWP* metric, where methane emissions are only cut to maintain “no additional warming”, the remaining carbon budget would be constrained. The best estimate of a 2C budget shrinks by around 30% to approximately 750GtCO2.

Finally, if methane emissions are not cut at all in the future, our findings suggest that the remaining carbon budget for 1.7C of global warming has, in effect, already been exhausted.

Our analysis shows how peak warming depends on both CO2 and methane reduction – and how methane-specific targets can help refine existing net-zero targets.

Crucially, we show that complementing net-zero CO2 targets with stringent methane cuts is necessary to limit peak warming to well-below 2C.

Weber, K. et al. (2026) Limiting warming by CO2 and methane mitigation in an expanded scenario space, Communications Earth & Environment, doi:10.1038/s43247-026-03832-1

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The post Guest post: Why tough methane cuts are crucial for keeping warming ‘well-below’ 2C appeared first on Carbon Brief.

This fall, 54 million K-12 students are headed back to the classroom for another year of lessons in all the classic subjects: math, English, history, biology. But there’s another subject that’s been sneaking into school curricula: plastics.

A new report from the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition documents the many ways the plastics industry has been inserting its agenda into classrooms across the U.S. — including through lesson plans and worksheets, hands-on science experiments, and a program called “PlastiVan” that travels from city to city teaching students about “the contribution plastics make to modern life.”

Industry interests offer these resources to teachers for free or for cheap, according to the report. The materials tend to highlight the necessity of plastics while downplaying their significant downsides to human health and the environment. 

“When that information is provided to kids, it obfuscates the true impacts of plastic pollution,” said Madison Dennis, senior policy and advocacy manager for Plastic Pollution Coalition and one of the report’s main authors. Besides harming marine life, plastics can expose people to hazardous chemicals, clog storm drains and contribute to flooding, and release planet-warming greenhouse gases. The Plastic Pollution Coalition is calling for stricter school policies against the use of industry-sponsored learning materials. 

The report lays out four case studies of plastics industry “propaganda” for schoolkids. One involves the Society of Plastics Engineers, or SPE, a trade group that recently became a division of the Plastics Industry Association. SPE’s lesson plans include activities like a “plastic scavenger hunt,” which aims for students to “understand that plastics are ubiquitous and their importance to society and their personal life.” A video titled “Your Bottle Means Jobs” explains how plastics recycling supports local employment. 

Another case study highlights the American Association of Chemistry Teachers, an initiative of the Dow Chemical Company. One of the association’s lesson plans teaches elementary and middle school students how to compare the strength of various types of plastic bags that can be found in a grocery store. After a brief experiment, the lesson invites them to “pretend [they] are an employee for Dow Chemical Company” and are designing a plastic bag for a customer. 

Eve Vitale, chief executive of SPE Foundation, inside a classroom at Warren Mott High School in Michigan in 2024. The SPE’s PlastiVan program tours schools around the country to teach kids the science behind plastics and generate interest in a future career in the industry.
Nic Antaya / The Washington Post via Getty Images

While many of the materials claim to support STEM learning objectives, they do so while promoting familiar industry talking points, emphasizing the affordability and safety of plastics. Some acknowledge plastic pollution as a serious problem, but they blame irresponsible consumer behaviors and, instead of recommending less plastic be produced, propose more recycling as the primary way to address it. 

In reality, only 9 percent of all plastics are recycled worldwide, and scientists have repeatedly warned that recycling will be unable to keep up with projected growth in plastic production. Investigative reporting has shown that industry groups knew this decades ago, but promoted recycling anyway in order to defuse growing concern over plastic pollution.

Wendy Johnson, a science education specialist at the National Center for Science Education, said the industry’s lesson plans and worksheets don’t reflect good pedagogy. Materials claiming to be aligned with state-level STEM standards don’t say which standards they support, or how they’re aligned. Lesson plans instruct students to read teachers’ notes, or list industry-specific vocab terms like “stretch blow molding” or “thermosetting.”

“By using all of these technical terms, it’s tricking people into thinking … that they’re doing science,” Johnson told Grist. What the materials really teach, she said, is “ideological perspectives about the economy,” like the desirability of cheap consumer goods. 

“It’s so clear that the purpose isn’t to make really clear, easy-to-use materials,” Johnson added. “The idea isn’t to teach,” but to get industry talking points into classrooms. The report documents plastics propaganda finding its way into schools since at least the 2000s. Between 2009 and 2011, for example, a plastics trade group lobbied the California Department of Education to add a section on “The Advantages of Shopping Bags” to the state’s high school textbooks. The PlastiVan initiative has been ongoing since 2011, and SPE claims it’s reached over 132,000 students in total.

Plastic Pollution Coalition suggests that the problem is particularly significant in schools located near petrochemical facilities. In Beaver County, Pennsylvania, for example, Shell operates a 386-acre plastics production complex and has invested millions of dollars in the development of plastics-related curricula and recycling programs, both for grade schoolers and for community college students. It has also donated hundreds of backpacks filled with school supplies, and bought one school a basketball court — seemingly in exchange for incorporating plastics recycling into the curriculum.

Shell didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment. Neither did SPE, the American Association of Chemistry Teachers, nor the school district in Beaver County.

The report hints at a broader problem with STEM education in U.S. public schools. Teachers often lack the time and money needed to design their own curricula, or to buy high-quality materials and lesson plans needed for in-class labs or science projects. When vested interests come along offering support — whether it’s the tobacco industry, the junk food industry, the pesticide industry, or the fossil fuel industry — it can be hard to say no. 

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“As a teacher, I’m always looking for free stuff,” said Suzie Hicks, a K-8 environmental educator in California who consulted on the Plastic Pollution Coalition report. Hicks said their education and background make them comfortable vetting materials for greenwashing — but that’s likely not the case with most teachers. 

Dennis recommended that school boards adopt policies banning educational materials sponsored by the chemical, fossil fuel, and plastics industries. She also emphasized the need for better school funding more generally, so that teachers and districts aren’t so desperate for ready-made learning materials.

One way to achieve this would be to eliminate tax breaks for petrochemical processing and plastics production facilities, which deprive communities of much-needed cash.

Katie Allen, executive director of Algalita, a California-based environmental nonprofit that develops educational materials on plastic pollution, pushed back against the idea that schools should ban all industry-sponsored content.

“Once you start banning one thing, where does it end? What I want to do is give educators the benefit of the doubt and allow them to make their own decisions,” she told Grist. She argued that teachers should be trusted to properly contextualize industry materials — and that they could even use them to teach critical-thinking skills.

That said, there are plenty of educational materials on plastics that are developed by non-industry sources. Algalita, for instance, offers free lesson plans on topics like plastic garbage patches in the oceans and biomagnification — the phenomenon where plastics build up inside sea creatures as you move up the food chain. The Story of Stuff, another nonprofit, offers a broader high school curriculum focused on the costs and consequences of producing consumer goods — including those made from plastics.

Those learning materials still come from organizations with an agenda. But Hicks argued they’re more trustworthy, since nonprofits usually aren’t trying to sell something.

Another option is for teachers to simply design their own curricula. That’s what Jacqueline Omania, a recently retired elementary school teacher in Berkeley, California, did in 2015. She turned her classroom into a zero-waste laboratory, and each year for 11 years, Omania and her students developed a set of zero-waste classroom agreements, vowing to minimize their plastics use — by swapping individual glue sticks for a communal tub of glue, for example — while also advocating for more systemic change, like by campaigning for a policy requiring Berkeley restaurants to stop giving out single-use plastic foodware.

“There are so many challenges in the world, but plastic is something tangible,” Omania said. “It’s right there in front of them, and they can see the difference that they’re actually making through their actions.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline When plastic companies write the lesson plans on Sep 1, 2026.

This report by ETC Group and GRAIN provides a snapshot on the state of agribusiness concentration in six key agricultural sectors: commercial seeds, pesticides, synthetic fertilisers, farm machinery, animal pharmaceuticals and livestock genetics.

The post Top 10 agribusiness giants: Corporate concentration in food and farming – 2026 Update appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Burnham affirms climate commitments Channel News brendan 1st September 2026 Teaser Media

As tech giants have expanded their reach into every corner of public and private life, their products and services have increasingly come to be seen as impossible to replace or reject. Yet although the cost of leaving the current technological ecosystem is immense, the price of staying in big tech’s grip is even higher. So, how can societies resist “digital colonialism”? An interview with Renata Ávila Pinto, CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation. 

This interview took place on 24 April, 2026, on the outskirts of the European Green Academy in Brussels. It has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. Some answers have been reordered thematically.

Amir Hashemi: What is digital colonialism to you?

Renata Ávila Pinto: I started using the term nearly two decades ago. At the time, I had many discussions with my colleagues in academia about the increasingly extractive practices of big tech companies. Some of them saw digital colonialism as the continuation of other colonialisms, but for me, this relationship has never been a Global South vs Global North issue. Rather, it’s a one-per-cent-against-the-99-per-cent problem.

Europeans and North Americans feel very uncomfortable when being described as colonised by a small group of people in California that, until recently, held little political or cultural power over them. “We have the rule of law, human rights principles, and strong institutions, so we’re safe,” they would say. But whether we like it or not, our culture, our way of living, and the way we interact with one another on the street are all being wiped out.

Many of us are only realising now that much of the public infrastructure we used to have – and even things as simple as a paper map or a physical menu – is disappearing fast. Now, everybody is glued to their small screens, constantly surveilled and feeding the systems that have taken control of so much of our lives.

Why have governments been unsuccessful at stopping this?

The current tech landscape is like a crumbling house whose owners keep increasing the rent without providing any maintenance. For the vast majority of people, there is no possibility of thriving in this environment. Big tech makes you pay several times for everything it provides you with: You have to pay through your taxes because, increasingly, all your government administration is done inside this ecosystem; you have to pay for an ever-expanding list of subscription services; and you are also made to pay with your data and knowledge. And as the AI race rages on, you have to pay with your planet. This is the devil’s deal that these companies get us into.

Governments and institutions use regulation as the primary way to keep tech giants in check. But this is like putting on a helmet and a safety vest and hoping to be safe when the walls collapse on you

Leaving this collapsing building requires courage and a choice – one that is political, commercial, and pragmatic. But governments and institutions say getting out is too costly. Instead, they choose to use regulation as the primary way to keep tech giants in check. But this is like putting on a helmet and a safety vest and hoping to be safe when the walls collapse on you. It hasn’t worked so far, and it will not in the future. The only viable tactic of resistance is to walk out of this crumbling building and deal with the consequences later.

How should this resistance be organised? Should governments take the lead, or is this primarily a choice for individual users?

One of the things that annoys me about certain currents of the environmental movement is their emphasis on individual choices and their belief that the general public is a big part of the problem. To me, this is victim-blaming, and it doesn’t solve the bigger issues. That said, I think we need to go for big wins, and for this, everyone has to play a role.

For all the damage that they inflict on society – on mental and public health as well as the environment – tech companies contribute very little value because their profits go to tax havens. Ongoing efforts in the EU and individual countries to ban social media use for children are a good start, but they are not enough and only chip away at the edges of the problem. Both civil society and governments can put pressure on tech multinationals through other means, including strategic litigation and refusing to engage with emerging, unnecessarily complex technologies. It is also important to expose how deeply we have come to depend on a handful of companies for everything ranging from basic services to satellites. The invisible hand of big tech must be made visible.

Assuming we are willing and able to leave behind this structural dependency on big tech and its products, what replacement should we aim for?

At the Open Knowledge Foundation, we have been pushing for public-interest technologies – tech solutions that are good enough for the purpose they serve, while staying climate-friendly, accessible, and sustainable. One proposal that we are pushing for is the local stack. A lot of what we use technology for can stay local, small, manageable, and accountable. Do we really need to go through two American corporations just to take care of our government administration or talk to the people we love?

Likewise, nowadays we see teenagers using advanced AI to make memes or edit photos. Memes are great, but we don’t need sophisticated, expensive technology to make them. You can do the same thing with a much smaller dataset. If we are going to consume vast amounts of energy and water, there should be good justification, like solving the world’s most pressing problems.

With its growing financial, political, and cultural power, big tech is increasingly closing off space for innovation. Today, if you want to release an app, you first have to agree to the terms and conditions of Apple and Alphabet. In other words, even for the simplest of tasks you have to go all the way to Silicon Valley and back. But things weren’t always like this. In the early days of the web, there was a lot more freedom to play with technology and innovate. It is this same openness that we have to aim for today to break big tech’s monopoly.

You have reinterpreted the term “digital transition”, which typically refers to the adoption of digital technologies, to describe the need to wrest these technologies out of big tech’s hands. Would you characterise this as a sort of technological degrowth?

It’s not necessarily degrowth. It is recalibration. And for Europe, it is also decoupling. There is no reason for my dating life, my medical records, and the way I interact with the state to all be in the same data centre.

The transition that I call for is from a sphere of submission to a space of control, autonomy, and more importantly, accountability. This vision is not anti-tech: it acknowledges the fact that technology mediates our lives, but refuses to accept that the current tech landscape is our best and only choice.

Such a transition also embraces friction. Without friction, you are trading away your rights for convenience or speed. In that way, it resembles and can learn from the green transition. For instance, riding a bike somewhere might take longer than taking the car, but in the eyes of those who wish to pollute less, do physical exercise, and avoid getting stuck in traffic, it is a trade-off worth going for.

What is the AI boom, coupled with the continued “enshittification” of tech platforms, doing to our knowledge systems?

It is very naïve to think that these companies will keep their services available free of charge for everyone, forever. This presents a profound danger, as more and more people get stuck in these ecosystems through years of intense interaction. And when you reach that point, it doesn’t matter whether you have a university degree or not. Everyone is vulnerable.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. But nowadays, freedom of information is no less important and no less under threat.

The system was already flawed, with browsers ranking content and burying webpages – the equivalent of a very censored library. Now, AI has made things much worse, removing the human element of knowledge seeking, curation, and presentation. We no longer have access to the “books”. There is only a voice reading certain information to us and omitting others, for reasons that we don’t know, and I think that’s terrifying. Another likely outcome is that AI companies will embed the nasty system of marketing in their products. If this happens, it will be very hard to differentiate facts from opinion, suggestion, or manipulation.

There are, of course, those who are trying to use advanced artificial intelligence for good, such as climate activists and digital rights campaigners, but there is no guarantee that access to these technologies will remain open.

Tech companies present the uncontrolled spread of advanced AI as inevitable while at every step fighting efforts to make the industry more transparent. For instance, Palantir’s “manifesto” disparages public discussions about the development of AI weapons and other digital technologies as “theatrical debates”.

Tech oligarchs often make these remarks, and they are nothing but pure rhetoric. What they want in reality is not a project of how they see the world. It’s just economic gain, power, and control. We know that one of the most polluting industries in the world is the military, and we know that one of the most polluting technologies is AI. What Palantir and its likes sell is fear, control, and global destruction.

This is precisely why openness is key, and why defending and advancing public information sources should be one of our top priorities. As Greens have correctly pointed out, large corporations have become the biggest hoarders of data, including public-interest data. This has to change.

That said, we’re not powerless to stop this. One of the things I learned from my years on Julian Assange’s defence team is that we often have far more space to act against injustice than we think we do. We have to keep pushing the boundaries and asking uncomfortable questions. There is now a small window of opportunity for this fight as well, since at no previous point have we had so many technologies that could help us map power and understand how it works in real time.

If social movements and political partisans recognise and seize this unoccupied space, I think the tech minority cannot circumvent the majority. But first, as I mentioned earlier, it is essential to get out of big tech’s playing field. If we only fight them in their own spaces, using the same platforms that they comfortably employ as megaphones, we will lose. But if we abandon their broken building, they will be shouting their empty prophecies to the walls.

Whatever else AI may do, its data centers will consume vast amounts of energy and keep driving fossil-fuel emissions for years to come, lending us humans a distinct helping hand in overheating this planet

Funding freezes, grant terminations, program cancellations, and a woefully understaffed USDA have disrupted the programs and services farmers and rural communities rely on to build environmentally resilient and economically viable businesses.

As soaring consumer prices, supply chain disruptions, and reductions in government-provided funding and services threaten communities, localists can help bolster local markets and inspire mutual aid efforts, helping mobilize folks to take more responsibility for their own collective resilience and well-being.

TORONTO — Canadian businesses are putting electric vehicles (EVs) to work across their operations, with more than 350 additional EVs on order for 2026 among this year’s Canadian Clean Fleet Award applicants. The applicants collectively operate more...

• The New York Times devoted 2,000 words to bike lanes and the politicians who ridicule them, never once considering whether they make streets and all of their users safer.
• The Trump administration is appealing a federal court ruling barring it from withholding funds for a $16 billion Hudson River rail tunnel. (Trains)
• The U.S. DOT is weakening rules governing fuel economy for heavy-duty commercial trucks. (E&E News)
• West Coast leaders from British Columbia to Baja are looking to create the infrastructure for electric semi trucks along Interstate 5, one of the busiest freight corridors in the country. (Government Technology)
• A motorist drove onto a sidewalk in Fort Collins during the popular Tour de Fat parade, killing one person and injuring five others. (Coloradoan)
• Austin is seeking public input on East Riverside Drive, a major thoroughfare between to highways that will host five future light rail stations. (KVUE)
• As in many places, cyclists in Minnesota are worried about getting doored. (Star Tribune)
• New automated cameras in Philadelphia started warning Route 13 speeders on Monday and will start issuing tickets after 60 days. (Inquirer)
• Pittsburgh’s annual Pedal PGH fundraiser drew 3,000 people. (WPXI)
• Northern Virginia voters will decide on a 1% sales tax for schools and transit in November. (Mercury)
• Dollywood holds lessons for urbanists due to its roots in East Tennessee history and culture. (Fast Company)
• Even though it’s good policy, Sarasota residents are not happy about having to pay for parking at night and on Sundays. (Herald-Tribune)
• A Florida Uber driver was cleared of stealing $3,000 worth of cinnamon rolls bound for a farmers market. (Local 10)
• Why don’t people complaining about high housing costs in the city just move out to the middle of nowhere? McSweeney’s wonders, satirically.

In our latest, we talk with Adam Johnson, co-host of Citations Needed podcast, and author of “How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza.” We…

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Every six to seven years, climate modelling groups around the world run a coordinated set of simulations that explore how the climate could change in the future. 

These simulations form a key line of evidence for future projections used in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports. 

They are built around a set of common scenarios – or “pathways” – of future greenhouse gas emissions.

A new set of scenarios has now been published for the seventh phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP7). 

These replace the “shared socioeconomic pathways” (SSPs) that drove the previous generation of climate models and featured heavily in the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6).

The new scenarios are quite different from their predecessors in a number of notable ways. 

Rather than being named, somewhat enigmatically, according to their “radiative forcing levels”, the new scenarios are named simply by their emissions trajectories – ranging from “low-to-negative” to “high”. 

They no longer consider “no-climate-policy” baseline worlds, but instead explore the implications of current policies continuing, being strengthened, or weakening.

These new scenarios also dramatically revise high-end future emissions downward, far below the highest scenarios in prior generations, in order to reflect a world where a 21st century dominated by coal use is no longer plausible.

At the same time, they revise the lowest emissions scenarios upwards relative to those featured in the AR6, with at least some “overshoot” of the Paris Agreement’s “aspirational” target to limit global warming to 1.5C now “unavoidable”.

While modelling groups are just getting started on the full Earth-system model simulations, the emissions scenarios give a clear picture of the range of futures that will inform the IPCC’s seventh assessment cycle (AR7).

Here, Carbon Brief unpacks how the new scenarios were designed and how they differ from the SSPs published almost a decade ago. 

The article also compares CO2 emissions and warming outcomes between the new scenarios and their predecessors, explores the range of future warming outcomes and examines why the high end of the scenario range has shifted markedly downward. 

Finally, Carbon Brief examines the scale of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) built into the scenarios and new extensions of scenarios to 2150 and beyond.

Key highlights from Carbon Brief’s analysis of the new scenarios include:

• The seven new scenarios give a range of global warming in 2100 from 1.6C to 3.3C above pre-industrial levels – markedly narrower than the 1.5C to 4.7C range in their SSP predecessors.
• The top of the scenario range has fallen for the first time in four generations of climate modelling. The highest scenarios used in the three previous IPCC assessment cycles all produced around 4.6-4.9C of global warming in 2100, whereas CMIP7’s high scenario only reaches 3.3C and has around half the cumulative CO2 emissions.
• The new “medium” scenario that is analogous to policies in place today reaches 2.9C in 2100, crossing 2C around 2050 and 3C around 2110, with a one-in-four chance of exceeding 4C by 2150.
• The lowest scenarios have shifted modestly upwards, as a future that avoids any overshoot of 1.5C is no longer considered plausible. The very-low scenario peaks at around 1.8C mid-century before falling back close to 1.5C by 2100.
• The updated socioeconomic assumptions underpinning the new scenarios describe a more crowded and less wealthy planet than the original SSPs, with the global human population now peaking at 10.1bn people around 2080 in the medium pathway and income per person in 2100 between 10% and 25% lower.
• Every scenario that limits warming leans heavily on carbon dioxide removal, with cumulative removals by 2150 ranging from 655GtCO2 in the very-low scenario to 2,360GtCO2 in low-to-negative scenario.

Article sections

• A new generation of scenarios
• Storylines and emissions levels
• No more ‘baseline’ scenarios and other changes
• Timescales and other changes
• A narrower range of future CO2 emissions
• What the new scenarios mean for future warming
• Crossing warming thresholds
• Carbon dioxide removal
• No single climate future
• Methodology

Article Contents Expand menu

• A new generation of scenarios
• Storylines and emissions levels
• No more ‘baseline’ scenarios and other changes
• Timescales and other changes
• A narrower range of future CO2 emissions
• What the new scenarios mean for future warming
• Crossing warming thresholds
• Carbon dioxide removal
• No single climate future
• Methodology

A new generation of scenarios

To simulate how human activity could shape the climate of the future, climate modellers must estimate future levels of “radiative forcings” – the external drivers that cause global warming. These include atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, air pollutants and land-use changes.

Given that no one knows how the future will unfold, modellers use a handful of scenarios that span a wide range of plausible outcomes.

The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenarioMIP) coordinates the development and running of emissions scenarios for climate models used in IPCC reports. 

In April 2026, high-level details about the new set of scenarios for CMIP7 were published in the journal Geoscientific Model Development (GMD).  

On 1 September, the underlying emissions data was released into the public domain by the ScenarioMIP team. 

There are seven new CMIP7 scenarios designed to drive model simulations for AR7. The first model runs took place in spring 2026 and initial results are expected later this year.

The previous SSP scenarios were starting to show their age. Finalised in 2015-17 using historical data ending in 2015, several years projected by the SSP scenarios were already in the past by the time AR6 concluded in 2021. Meanwhile, the world had changed considerably. 

(For a full guide to the SSPs, see Carbon Brief‘s 2018 explainer.)

Storylines and emissions levels

The most visible change in the new generation of scenarios is their names. Where the SSPs combined five socioeconomic “storylines” with radiative forcing targets (SSP1-2.6, SSP5-8.5, etc), the CMIP7 scenarios are named simply for the emissions trajectory that they follow.

The table below summarises the seven scenarios and the integrated assessment model (IAM) that produced each “marker” run – in other words, the specific IAM run used to generate the scenario that, in turn, will be used by CMIP7 climate models. IAMs run simulations of how the future energy system and emissions may evolve under different assumptions around socioeconomics, future technology costs and climate policy.

The table below also details how the scenario fares against a number of key metrics assessed by Carbon Brief, including CO2 emissions and warming outcomes. 

(For more on Carbon Brief’s approach, see: Methodology.).

ScenarioMarker IAMUnderlying SSPEmissions pathwayNet CO2 in 2100 (GtCO2/yr)Cumulative CO2, 2024-2100 (GtCO2)Warming in 2100 (C vs 1850-1900)High (H)GCAM 8sSSP3Emissions as high as plausible with policy rollback553,8203.3 (2.6-4.4)High-to-low (HL)WITCH 6.0SSP5High to mid-century, then net-zero CO2 by 2100-12,5662.8 (2.1-4.0)Medium (M)IMAGE 3.4SSP2Current policies frozen at 2025 levels342,8142.9 (2.2-3.9)Medium-low (ML)COFFEE 1.6SSP2Medium until 2040, then decline to net-zero CO2 by 2100-91,7572.3 (1.7-3.3)Low (L)MESSAGEix-GLOBIOM 2.1SSP2Aims to keep warming likely below 2C-96731.8 (1.3-2.7)Very-low (VL)REMIND-MAgPIE 3.5-4.11SSP11.5C with as little overshoot as plausible-63101.6 (1.1-2.5)Low-to-negative (LN)AIM 3.0SSP21.5C with higher overshoot, then net-negative greenhouse gases-253841.7 (1.2-2.5)

Warming values are medians (with the 5-95% range) from the 841-member FaIR ensemble used in this article (see: Methodology); the marker model assignments come from the ScenarioMIP database. Note that scenario names in the database differ from the official CMIP7 names (for example, the high-to-low scenario appears as “SSP5 – Medium-Low Emissions_a”).

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Each of the new scenarios is built on a set of updated SSP storylines similar to those used in the original SSP scenarios. These include assumptions about future population, technological and economic growth, as well as potential for international cooperation that shape the resulting emissions pathways. The socioeconomic assumptions underlying these revised SSPs were updated in 2024 with new population and economic projections. 

Most of the new emissions scenarios are now based on the “middle-of-the-road” SSP2 that assumes current socioeconomic trends broadly continue, with only one scenario using each of SSP1 (“sustainability”), SSP3 (“regional rivalry”) and SSP5 (“fossil-fuelled development”). None of the new scenarios uses SSP4 (“inequality”). 

The solid lines in the figure below show updated global human population, GDP and GDP per capita values in CMIP7 (solid lines), compared to the original SSPs from CMIP’s sixth phase (CMIP6), shown by the dashed lines.

World population (left), GDP (centre) and GDP per capita (right) for SSPs 1-5 in the original 2013-era SSP database (dashed) and the 2024 update (solid). Note that the updated SSP1 and SSP5 population curves effectively overlap. GDP is shown in 2017 US dollars PPP, with the original converted from 2005 US dollars using the US GDP deflator (x1.235). Data from the IIASA SSP database; chart by Carbon Brief.

The change in socioeconomic assumptions is substantial. Global population was revised upward in nearly every scenario, with the updated SSP2 projecting there will be 9.9 billion people in 2100 – an increase of 1 billion people compared to the 2013-era SSP. 

GDP was revised downward in the high-end growth scenarios (SSP1 and SSP5), slightly upward in SSP3 and SSP4 and was largely unchanged in SS2. 

The combination of these changes means that income per person in 2100 is around 10-25% lower in most scenarios, with only SSP3 and SSP4 seeing mostly unchanged income per capita. 

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In short, the socioeconomic world underlying the new scenarios is somewhat more crowded and less wealthy per person than the one the SSPs originally imagined.

Another notable change is the shift in the SSP that underlies the highest future emissions scenario. 

In the original SSPs, the “very high” SSP5-8.5 scenario was based on SSP5, while the new “high” scenario in CMIP7 is based on SSP3. 

The GMD study explains that this is because IAM teams that developed the scenarios found that SSP3 and SSP5 variants produced similar emissions. They judged that the “fragmented” SSP3 world – which is characterised by large challenges to adaptation – to be more relevant for exploring high-end risks.

No more ‘baseline’ scenarios and other changes

In another important change, the authors of the CMIP7 scenarios decided to eliminate “baseline” scenarios that assumed a world without any climate policy. These scenarios were previously used as a counterfactual against which to compare climate-changed worlds.

Instead, the range of future emissions scenarios starts with current policies and explores ways that they could be strengthened, weakened, or kept the same. The high scenario explores a plausible “rollback of current mitigation policies“. 

The medium scenario, by contrast, extends climate policies officially implemented as of 2025, without assuming countries achieve their Paris Agreement pledges – known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – or net-zero targets that are not yet backed by legislation. 

In their GMD paper, the authors of the CMIP7 scenarios emphasise that the medium scenario “should not be considered as a ‘most likely’ scenario”, but that it can provide a benchmark against which the effect of future policy strengthening or weakening can be measured. It is roughly analogous in its emissions levels to the old SSP2-4.5 scenario.

The new low scenario explores a world where climate policy is rapidly strengthened and warming by 2100 is limited to below 2C. This makes it analogous to the old SSP1-2.6 scenario. 

The very-low scenario limits global warming to around 1.5C by 2100, similar to the old SSP1-1.9 scenario. However, it involves a greater degree of overshoot mid-century, reflecting the fact that global emissions did not begin to rapidly decline in 2020 as envisioned by SSP1-1.9. As the authors of the GMD ScenarioMIP paper point out: “At this point of time, some overshoot of the 1.5C seems unavoidable.”

In addition, there are a number of scenarios that start on one path before undertaking rapid mitigation. These high-to-low, medium-to-low and low-to-negative scenarios are intended to explore futures where mitigation is further delayed, followed by a rapid turn-around later in the century.

The scenario developers noted that there is no specific likelihood or probabilities assigned to any scenario, but rather only a judgement that all are within the realm of plausibility given where the world is today. They also said that “there might be potential futures outside the ScenarioMIP scenario range”.

Timescales and other changes

In addition to the shift away from baseline scenarios, there are three other notable design changes made in CMIP7. 

First, CMIP7 models will be driven by emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, rather than set atmospheric concentrations. 

In every previous generation of models, the ScenarioMIP experiments required that modelling groups simulate future climate using the same set of CO2 concentrations. For CMIP7, models with an interactive carbon cycle are asked to run in “emissions-driven” mode for CO2, calculating atmospheric concentrations themselves based on emissions. 

This is a significant improvement. It means that the substantial uncertainty in carbon-cycle feedbacks will now show up directly in the range of projected warming, rather than being overlooked. (The change applies to CO2 only; methane, nitrous oxide and halocarbons remain prescribed as concentrations.) 

Second, emissions match observations up to 2023. IAM modellers were asked to stay close to observed trends up to 2025 to avoid emissions diverging from reality before models were run. Scenario differences only open up after 2026, avoiding an earlier problem of scenarios diverging from reality years before the models were even run.

Finally, the period over which models are being run has been extended from 2100 to 2150. This is important as the world is already more than a quarter of the way through the 21st century. 

The extended model runs out to 2150 will provide a more thorough exploration of the warming that people born in the coming decades may experience within their lifetimes. 

In addition, all scenarios have extensions to 2500 where temperatures are eventually stabilised. These allow scientists to explore changes to long-term Earth-system processes, such as ice sheets and sea level, as well as whether warming is reversible. 

A narrower range of future CO2 emissions

Overall, the new scenarios provide a notably more narrow range of future CO2 emissions than the SSP scenarios used in CMIP6. 

The figure below shows net global CO2 emissions (combining fossil-fuel and land-use emissions) for the seven new scenarios, alongside the five SSP scenarios used for climate model runs in CMIP6 (e.g. SSP1-1.9, SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5).

Net global CO2 emissions (GtCO2/yr) in the seven CMIP7 scenarios (solid lines, coloured) and the CMIP6-era SSP scenarios (dashed) for the period from 1990 to 2100. CMIP7 scenarios are harmonised to 2023, while SSP scenarios (from RCMIP) were harmonised to 2015. Data from the ScenarioMIP database and RCMIP; chart by Carbon Brief.

At the bottom of the range, the new scenarios closely track their predecessors: the very-low scenario reaches net-zero CO2 around mid-century much like SSP1-1.9, while the low scenario lands close to SSP1-2.6. 

The chart below shows total emissions for the same scenarios for the period 2024-2100.

Cumulative global CO2 emissions (GtCO2) between 2024 and 2100 in the seven CMIP7 scenarios (solid colours) and the CMIP6-era SSPs (light colours). Data from the ScenarioMIP database and RCMIP; chart by Carbon Brief.

The lowest emissions scenarios now have somewhat higher total emissions, reflecting the failure of the world to rapidly reduce emissions after 2020 that occurred in the lower SSP emissions scenarios, such as SSP1-1.9 and SSP1-2.6. The very-low scenario results in 310bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) cumulative emissions between 2024 and 2100, compared to around 110GtCO2 in SSP1-1.9.

At the top end, the change is particularly dramatic. The high scenario in CMIP7 reaches 55GtCO2 per year in 2100. The previous high scenario, SSP5-8.5, by contrast, reached around 126GtCO2 per year in 2100. 

In cumulative terms – which is what matters most for global warming – high reaches around 3,820GtCO2 over 2024-2100, half the roughly 7,600GtCO2 of SSP5-8.5 and about three-quarters of the 5,140GtCO2 of SSP3-7.0.

To put it another way: the top of the new scenario range sits between SSP2-4.5 and SSP3-7.0 in cumulative emissions terms, which is territory that CMIP6 treated as its middle ground.

To make the scale of this shift clear, Carbon Brief analysed the CO2 emissions trajectories in each of the prior generations of high-end emissions scenarios, using the same simple climate model – FaIR – to calculate future warming.

Fossil CO2 emissions relative to 1850-1900 for the highest scenario of each climate modelling generation: SRES A1FI (CMIP3, used in AR4), RCP8.5 (CMIP5, AR5), SSP5-8.5 (CMIP6, AR6) and CMIP7’s high, all run through AR6-calibrated FaIR ensemble. Data: SRES database v1.1, RCMIP v5.1, ScenarioMIP database; chart by Carbon Brief.

Below, four different generations of emissions scenarios are examined. The SRES scenarios were originally published in 2000 and used in the IPCC’s third (2001) and fourth (2007) assessment reports (and the corresponding CMIP3 model runs). The RCPs were developed in the early 2010s and used in the IPCC fifth assessment report (AR5; 2013) and CMIP5, while the SSPs were developed in the late 2010s and used in the IPCC AR6 report and CMIP6.

Over the past two decades, the highest emissions scenarios all resulted in comparable amounts of warming in 2100: SRES A1FI (the highest SRES scenario) reached 4.6C in 2100 (5-95% range; 3.5-6.1C), RCP8.5 reached 4.9C (3.7-6.5C) and SSP5-8.5 reached 4.6C (3.5-6.2C). 

(RCP8.5 edges out its successor despite lower CO2 emissions because it assumed considerably more methane and nitrous oxide.) 

Global mean surface temperature change in 2100 relative to 1850-1900 (medians and 5-95% ranges) for the highest scenario of each climate modelling generation: SRES A1FI (CMIP3, used in AR4), RCP8.5 (CMIP5, AR5), SSP5-8.5 (CMIP6, AR6) and CMIP7’s high, all run through AR6-calibrated FaIR ensemble. Data: SRES database v1.1, RCMIP v5.1, ScenarioMIP database; chart by Carbon Brief.

CMIP7’s high scenario comes in remarkably lower, at 3.3C (2.6-4.4C).

The downward revision of future emissions in CMIP7 reflects two key changes since RCP8.5 was published back in 2011. First, the plausible baseline of a repeal of current policy has fallen. Cheap solar, wind and batteries, a global plateau in coal use and more than $2tr per year in clean-energy investment mean that a rollback in climate policy would not result in coal deployment levels assumed in the RCP8.5 scenario.

The GMD study states that CMIP6’s high-emission levels “have become implausible, based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends”. 

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s recent factcheck of false claims around the retirement of the SSP5-8.5 emissions scenario. Also see Carbon Brief’s recent interview with Prof Detlef van Vuuren, a key architect of both the old SSPs and new scenarios.)

Second, part of the apparent decline reflects a correction of how scenarios are communicated – rather than real-world progress. The old high-end scenarios always represented an estimate of worst-case scenarios at the time, rather than likely outcomes. 

Genuine progress in reducing emissions probably accounts for around 0.7C of the roughly 1.7C gap between SSP5-8.5 and today’s current-policy trajectory, with the remainder reflecting that the baseline was never particularly likely.

What the new scenarios mean for future warming

To compare warming outcomes across scenario generations on a like-for-like basis, Carbon Brief ran both the seven CMIP7 scenarios and the CMIP6 SSP emission scenarios through the same simple climate model. 

(This is FaIR v2.2, using the 841-member ensemble calibrated and constrained to match the assessment of climate sensitivity in IPCC AR6, historical warming and ocean heat uptake). 

These values may differ from the ultimate results that are found by CMIP7 climate models, but give a sneak peak of what those results may look like when they become available.

Median warming relative to 1850-1900 for the seven CMIP7 scenarios, with observations to 2025 (black) and the 5-95% ensemble range shaded for the medium and low scenarios. Dashed lines show warming between 2100 and 2150. Chart by Carbon Brief.

The seven scenarios produce warming in 2100, relative to pre-industrial (1850-1900), that ranges from 1.6C (with a 5-95% range of 1.1-2.5C) in the very-low scenario to 3.3C (2.6-4.4C) in high, with the current-policy medium scenario reaching 2.9C (2.2-3.9C). Warming also continues after 2100 in both the medium and high scenarios.

The figure below shows the range of 2100 warming (5th to 95th percentile) relative to the preindustrial period expected in each of the old SSP scenarios and the new CMIP7 ones, along with a central estimate (white dots).

Warming in 2100 for CMIP7 scenarios and CMIP6 SSPs run through the identical FaIR ensemble (medians and 5-95% ranges). Chart by Carbon Brief.

The largest changes are, unsurprisingly, at the top. CMIP7’s high scenario (3.3C in 2100) produces less warming than SSP3-7.0 (3.7C in the same ensemble) and far less than SSP5-8.5 (4.7C). 

The entire CMIP6 “high” tier (e.g. SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0) now sits above anything in the new scenario set, at least up to 2100. Extended beyond 2100, however, high keeps climbing towards levels the previous extreme scenarios reached earlier.

At the low end, the picture is more similar. The very-low scenario (1.6C in 2100) lands close to SSP1-1.9 (1.5C) and low (1.8C) is essentially indistinguishable from SSP1-2.6 (1.8C) in 2100. 

However, the new low scenario involves more rapid late-century emissions reductions and greater amounts of carbon removal than its SSP analogue, while the very-low scenario involves greater overshoot of 1.5C mid-century.

Crossing warming thresholds

In addition to calculating 2100 and 2150 warming, Carbon Brief has calculated the likelihood of passing different global warming levels (2C, 2.5C, 3C, 4C and 5C) over time in the new CMIP7 scenarios. 

The chart below uses the IPCC approach of calculating the crossing year based on a 20-year average, rather than when a single year exceeds the warming level.

Share of the 841-member FaIR climate model runs that exceed each warming level by year under the medium (top) and high (bottom) scenarios. Marked years show the median IPCC-convention (20-year average) crossing; percentages show the chance of exceeding each level by 2150. Chart by Carbon Brief.

Under the medium scenario, which reflects a world where current policies are maintained, passing 1.5C is essentially locked in. 

Most models cross the threshold by the late 2020s or early 2030s. The 2C limit is crossed around 2050 on average and 3C by around 2110. The chance of exceeding 4C is around one-in-four by 2150, but, ultimately, rises to roughly 50% if emissions continue after that point.

Under the high scenario, 2C arrives in the 2040s, 3C in the 2080s and the chance of exceeding 4C by 2150 is around 60% (and around 95% by 2300). Even 5C is reached by 2150 in roughly 20% of climate model simulations.

The lower scenarios tell a different story. In the very-low scenario, the chance that peak warming (which the IPCC determines using a 20-year average of warming) ever exceeds 1.5C is around 90%. This reflects the fact that passing 1.5C is almost unavoidable at this point. 

However, the chance of surpassing 2C sits at around 30% and the scenario has warming falling after mid-century as more CO2 is removed from the atmosphere than is added. 

Carbon dioxide removal

Every scenario that has global warming peaking and declining requires pulling CO2 back out of the atmosphere. Otherwise, warming from CO2 emissions will persist for millennia. 

CO2 removal (CDR) remains one of the few levers available to reduce future temperatures – particularly given additional warming caused by cuts to aerosol pollution. 

The chart below shows the total CDR deployment in each of the different scenarios by year, reflecting the sum of both land-based and engineered approaches (top), as well as the total CDR deployment between 2024 and 2150 (bottom).

Total carbon dioxide removal (CDR) in the CMIP7 scenarios (solid) and their extensions (dashed), including both “engineered” and “novel” methods (bioenergy and carbon capture and storage (BECCS), direct air capture (DAC), enhanced weathering, biochar) plus land-based removals (the net land-use sink plus soil carbon management), along with with cumulative CDR for 2024-2150. Chart by Carbon Brief.

Every scenario that deeply cuts global emissions in CMIP7 also involves a large amount of CDR. 

The low-to-negative scenario pulls a cumulative 2,360GtCO2 out of the atmosphere by 2150, roughly 60 years of today’s emissions run in reverse. 

The high-to-low scenario has around 1,480GtCO2 cumulative CDR, medium-low has 1,450GtCO2 and low has 1,360GtCO2. 

Even the very-low scenario, which seeks to minimise CDR use, requires 655GtCO2 of removals between 2024 and 2150.

The degree to which scenarios rely on “engineered” removals – such as the use of biochar or direct air capture – or land-based removals – including afforestation and reforestation – ranges  across models. 

In the low scenario, roughly one-third of the removals is from the land “sink”, while low-to-negative relies almost entirely on engineered methods, with direct air capture alone reaching around 16GtCO2 per year by 2100.

The chart below shows the deployment of engineered removals by year (top), as well as the total engineered CDR used between 2024 and 2150 (bottom). The lower plot also includes a breakdown between the portion of CDR that requires geologic storage (e.g. DAC and BECCS) and the portion that does not (e.g. enhanced weathering and biochar) and compares the total to a recent “prudent” total CO2 storage limit published in the scientific literature.

(For more on limits to carbon storage capacity, see Carbon Brief’s 2025 guest post.)

Engineered and novel CO2 removal only, with the cumulative BECCS and direct air capture component – the technologies requiring geological storage – compared against the “prudent” 1,460GtCO2 (range 1,290-2,710GtCO2) geologic storage limit set out in Gidden et al. (2025). Chart by Carbon Brief.

The amount of CDR going toward geological storage is most highest in the low-to-negative scenario, which injects around 1,750GtCO2 of BECCS and direct-air-capture CO2 underground by 2150. 

The high-to-low and low scenarios each commit around 800GtCO2 to storage by 2150. This is within the range of available geologic storage, but would require that the storage industry handles more CO2 than the mass of oil currently moved by the fossil-fuel industry. 

That said, there are other potential CDR approaches – such as enhanced rock weathering, surficial mineralisation and ocean alkalinity enhancement – that do not require injection of CO2 into geologic formations. In-situ mineralisation approaches that inject CO2 into alkaline rock formations such as basalt or peridotite could also open up more potential CO2 storage.

It is worth noting that the amount of CDR deployed in these scenarios would require planetary-scale engineering at the cost of trillions of dollars, while many of the engineered CDR approaches are still relatively early-stage technologies. 

No single climate future

The goal of scenarios is to span a range of possible futures. While it may be tempting to treat current climate and energy policies – and the medium scenario – as a forecast, there is no reason to expect that they will not change in the future. 

It is likely that policies will continue to be strengthened, as has been the case over the past two decades. However, they may also be weakened if national priorities or politics change, as has happened in the US during the two terms of the Trump administration.

In the new CMIP7 scenarios there is no “business-as-usual” scenario, but rather a narrower range of futures than was available in CMIP6, reflecting greater clarity among scientists on where the world is heading in terms of future energy use and emissions. 

The fact that the worst-case scenarios of the past have become increasingly implausible is good news. However, this is tempered by the fact that the very-low emission scenarios have, in turn, become harder to achieve given that global emissions have yet to decline.

There is also real uncertainty in the climate-system response to emissions. This is due to uncertainty around how sensitive the climate is to a build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere, as well as how the carbon cycle will respond to emissions. 

The CMIP7 medium scenario – which has a central estimate of 2.9C of warming by 2100 – still has around a 3% chance of reaching 4C by that date. If emissions continue, those odds increase to 25% by 2150. This remains far outside anything resembling a safe outcome for the climate system.

The scenarios are now being run using the new CMIP7 models, whose emissions-driven runs will fold carbon-cycle uncertainty directly into projections. These projections will subsequently be analysed in the reports of AR7. 

Ultimately, it will be decisions made by governments, businesses and individuals that decide which of these seven futures become closest to reality.

Methodology

Emissions scenarios shown in this article are the seven CMIP7 ScenarioMIP scenarios set out in van Vuuren et al. (2026), harmonised to observed 2023 emissions, with rule-based extensions to 2500 generated using the FLEX methodology. Emissions through 2100 match the ScenarioMIP database; extension trajectories are indicative and may differ from the final published extensions.

Temperature projections use FaIR v2.2 with the fair-calibrate v1.4.5 constrained ensemble (841 members set out in Smith et al. (2024), which matches the AR6 assessed climate sensitivity (ensemble ECS median 3C, 5-95% 2.0-5.1C), historical warming and ocean heat content. 

Historical emissions (1750-2022) use the FaIR historical emissions dataset, with scenario emissions spliced in after 2023. 

Solar and volcanic forcing are updated through 2025 from the Climate Indicator forcing timeseries; future volcanic forcing ramps to the 1850-2021 climatological background by 2035 (following the CMIP7 protocol) and solar forcing follows a SOLARIS-HEPPA-derived cycle projection to 2300. 

All warming is expressed relative to 1850-1900.

SSP comparisons run the RCMIP-harmonised CMIP6 scenario emissions through the FaIR ensemble, which yields 2081-2100 warming 0.1-0.3C below the AR6-assessed values at the high end (e.g. SSP5-8.5: 4.2C vs 4.4C assessed), reflecting differences between the AR6 assessment and the FaIR configurations used here. Updating the volcanic dataset to use CMIP7 values (which revises the eruption-rich 1850-1900 baseline period) raises all reported anomalies by 0.03-0.05C.

For CDR, the scenario database reports the technology split (for example, BECCS, direct air capture, enhanced weathering, biochar, ocean-based, soil carbon management). Agriculture, forestry and other land-use  (AFOLU) removals are available only as a net flux, so are shown as the net sink where negative. Soil-carbon management is grouped with land-based rather than engineered removal, and the geological storage comparison uses BECCS plus direct air capture only. 

The figure showing high-end scenarios for the past four CMIP generations runs SRES A1FI through the same ensemble using the A1G MiniCAM model from the SRES database v1.1, spliced onto historical emissions at 2000, and covering CO2 (fossil and land use), methane, nitrous oxide and sulphur; SRES-era ozone-precursor projections (nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds) lie outside the calibrated range of FaIR, so RCP8.5 values are used instead. RCP8.5 uses RCMIP v5.1 emissions, with 13 minor halogenated gases absent from the RCP database following SSP5-8.5.

Related Guest post: How CMIP7 will shape the next wave of climate science 22.05.2026 Climate modelling Traditional models still ‘outperform AI’ for extreme weather forecasts 29.04.2026 Climate modelling Limiting global warming to 2C would not ‘rule out’ extreme impacts 25.03.2026 Climate modelling State of the climate: 2025 in top-three hottest years on record as ocean heat surges 14.01.2026 Climate modelling

The post Explainer: The CMIP7 emissions scenarios – and how they explore future climate change appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Recorded live at Scoundrel and Scamp Theatre in Tucson as part of CWP’s Keep Parks Public campaign, Aaron interviews four experts about the current state of Arizona’s public lands: Matthew Nelson with the Arizona Trail Association, Russ McSpadden with the Center for Biological Diversity, Emily Burns with Sky Island Alliance, and Amy Juan from the Tohono O’odham Nation.

We discuss the impacts of border wall construction on wildlife corridors and Indigenous sites, along with staffing and funding cuts at land management agencies and rollbacks of environmental protections, from Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge to Quitobaquito Springs.

News

• Death Toll Rises in Grand Canyon Flood as Search Efforts Continue – New York Times

Resources

• Keep Parks Public Tour
• Arizona Trail Association
• Center for Biological Diversity
• Sky Island Alliance
• Watch this episode on YouTube

Produced by Aaron Weiss, Lauren Bogard, Kate Groetzinger, and Lilly Bock-Brownstein
Feedback: podcast@westernpriorities.org
Music: Purple Planet
Featured image: CWP photo

The post LIVE from Tucson: Arizona’s Public Lands and the Border Wall appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink

On the morning of August 26th, part of a glacier cliff on the north face of Langtang Lirung (a ~7,200 meter peak 60 km north of Kathmandu) collapsed. The falling mass of ice and rock released energy equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 earthquake according to the USGS, and set off a debris flow that traveled ~100 km down into the Trishuli and Bhote Koshi rivers. This buried and washed away large parts of towns, severed the only highway between Nepal and China, and damaged at least six hydropower facilities. Currently (the morning of August 28th), reports put the death toll at around 500, with roughly 2,000 people still missing across Nepal and Tibet, and we expect these numbers to continue to rise.

The tragedy is unfortunately familiar for the Langtang valley. In 2015, shaking from a magnitude 7.8 earthquake released an avalanche of ice and rock from this same mountain that buried Langtang village and killed around 300 people. But there is an important difference between the two events: in 2015 an earthquake triggered the collapse. This time there was no tectonic trigger. The mountain simply failed, and the collapse itself produced a seismic event that was initially mistaken for an earthquake.

Within hours, some people on social media were confidently asserting that climate change caused the disaster, while others were just as confidently asserting it had nothing to do with it. In this piece I’ll try and lay out what the data and the scientific literature actually supports.

The short version is this: any formal attribution of this specific collapse to climate change is premature, and single events like this are genuinely hard to attribute even after careful study. At the same time, the collapse happened on a mountain that has warmed rapidly for decades, immediately after four consecutive summers that all rank among the five warmest in at least 86 years, and in a valley that has been losing ice at an accelerating rate. A rapidly warming climate and retreating glaciers are increasing risks of these sorts of events in the region, whether or not we can ultimately attribute this particular event.

A rapidly warming mountain

Let’s take a look at how temperatures have changed in the region where the glacier collapsed. The figure below shows ERA5 surface air temperatures for the ~25 km grid cell containing the glacier, both for monthly anomalies since 1940 and the summer (June–August) average for each year.1

ERA5 2m temperature for the 0.25° grid cell containing the Langtang Lirung collapse source zone (28.25N, 85.5E, with a gridcell elevation of 4,322 m). Top: monthly anomalies relative to a 1961–1990 baseline, with a 12-month running mean. Bottom: June–August mean temperature per year, 1940–2026; the 2026 value is preliminary (ERA5T, August through the 22nd). See this article’s GitHub page for underlying data.

Summers at the site have warmed at around 0.29C per decade since 1940, with the most recent 30 years (1996-2025) averaging about 1C warmer than the 1961-1990 baseline. The four most recent summers (2022 through 2025) all rank among the five warmest on record. A newly published study of the Langtang Catchment (Silwal et al 2026) also provides a separate check on my numbers. Using the higher-resolution ERA5-Land product, they find the glacial areas of the catchment (above 4000 m) warmed at 0.31C per decade over 1960-2023.

The glacial collapse came at the end of an exceptionally warm monsoon season. July 2026 was the second warmest July in the 86-year record (at 9.4C, behind only 2024’s 9.8C). The first three weeks of August (the latest daily data available when I ran this analysis) averaged 9.3C, running above the warmest complete August on record (9.1C in 2022). The collapse came on August 26th.2

Warm summers do not by themselves knock a mountain down. But sustained warmth at a glacial cliff increases risks by melting the ice that buttresses steep slopes, sending meltwater into cracks in the rock, and degrading the permafrost that acts as a frozen glue holding fractured high-altitude rock faces together (Gruber and Haeberli 2007). As the glaciologist Jakob Steiner told Scientific American, “you basically had the lower part of a glacier tongue that sheared off because the rock below failed.”

A valley losing its ice

Next let’s look at whats been happening to the region’s glaciers. The figure below shows glacier mass balance for the surrounding region (the Randolph Glacier Inventory’s South Asia East region, which spans the Himalaya east of ~81E, including Nepal) from the WGMS annual mass change estimates, along with in-situ measurements from two Nepali glaciers where long term measurements are available. This includes Yala Glacier in the Langtang valley itself, around 10 km from the collapse site.

Annual and cumulative glacier mass balance for the RGI South Asia East region (WGMS annual mass-change estimates v2026, hydrological years 1957–2025, ±1σ shading), and annual in-situ mass balance for Yala Glacier (Langtang valley) and Mera Glacier (Everest region) from the WGMS Fluctuations of Glaciers database. See this article’s GitHub page for underlying data.

Regional glaciers have lost a cumulative 26 meters of water equivalent since 1957 – equivalent to shaving roughly 30 meters of ice thickness off the average glacier surface. More than half of that loss (about 14 m w.e.) has occurred since the year 2000, with 2024 and 1997 as the two biggest loss years on record. Yala Glacier, the closest measured glacier to the collapse site, lost an average of 0.92 m w.e. per year over 2012–2025, with its worst year (-1.90 m w.e.) in 2024.3

Yala has become something of a symbol of Himalayan ice loss: this past May, ICIMOD and local communities held a tribute ceremony at the glacier, which has shrunk by 66% and retreated 784 meters since it was first surveyed in the 1970s. In their new paper, Silwal and colleagues find Yala’s equilibrium line (the altitude above which a glacier gains mass) has risen roughly 200–250 m since the 1980s and now sits above 5600 m. This is above the top of the glacier itself, meaning the entire glacier now sits in the melt zone.

Studies of the Langtang catchment specifically have found glacier thinning nearly doubled between 1974-2006 and 2006-2015 Ragettli et al 2016, mirroring the Himalaya-wide doubling of ice loss between 1975-2000 and 2000-2016 found by Maurer et al (2019) and the global acceleration documented by Hugonnet et al (2021).

The Langtang catchment has lost around 42% of its glacier area since the Little Ice Age (~1815, Silwal et al 2026), with the rate of loss more than quadrupling from 0.11% per year over 1815-1964 to 0.49% per year over 1964-2023, and the fastest loss coming after 2000. The number of glaciers nearly doubled (58 to 115) over that period as retreating glaciers have fragmented and disconnected into pieces.

The cause of this ice loss is clear. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report concluded that “human influence is very likely the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s.” When researchers have done formal attribution studies of individual glacier hazards (e.g. Stuart-Smith et al (2021) on the glacial lake threatening Huaraz, Peru), they have found glacier retreat that is “virtually certain” to be outside natural variability.

Why attribution of the collapse itself is premature

So why not simply connect the dots, and say that a warming mountain, retreating glaciers, and a record-warm August led to the collapse? The challenge is that the chain of causation for rock-ice avalanches is much messier than for glacier retreat, and the scientific literature on these events is consistently, and appropriately, cautious.

The Himalayan mountains have always shed ice and rock, as skeptics of any climate link will point out. The 2015 Langtang avalanche in the region was caused by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake rather than a string of warm summers. Steep glaciated faces fail for reasons of geometry, geology, and bad luck that have nothing to do with human emissions. Attribution of a specific collapse requires detailed forensic reconstructions on specific drivers before causes can be known with any certainty, and that work will take months to years.

The best precedent here is the February 2021 Chamoli disaster in the Indian Himalaya, where a rock-ice avalanche killed more than 200 people. The definitive study of that event (Shugar et al 2021 in Science) reconstructed the failure in detail but stopped short of attributing it to climate change, while noting that warming increases the probability of such events. Studies of other large glacier collapses, like the 2016 twin glacier detachments in Tibet (Kääb et al 2018), reach similarly hedged conclusions. A 2021 survey found an apparent increase in large glacier-related landslides in High Mountain Asia over 1998–2018, but its authors flagged the small sample size and cautioned that the association with warming “requires further research.” We simply do not have the kind of long, well-observed event record for high-mountain collapses that we have for heatwaves or heavy rainfall, where rapid attribution is now routine.

There is a related argument I’ve seen circulating online that events like this happened long before modern warming, and if anything a world with more glaciers should have more ice available to fall. The first part is clearly true. The largest ice avalanche ever observed in the Alps came off the Altels glacier in 1895 (around 4 million cubic meters), and a 1962 rock-ice avalanche from Huascarán in Peru killed around 4,000 people with no apparent trigger at all. Mountains were shedding ice catastrophically well before we started burning fossil fuels in earnest. But the existence of old events tells us nothing about whether the odds are changing, and heat waves happened in 1900 too (just less frequently). It is worth noting that the the best modern reanalysis of the Altels collapse, Faillettaz et al 2011, suspects hot summers in the preceding years warmed the glacier’s frozen bed toward the melting point.

Hazard from these slopes are not solely determined by how much ice sits on them. Rather, what drives risks is how fast the ice and the frozen ground beneath the ice are changing. A cold glacier frozen to its bed in a stable climate will be comparatively secure, but one in transition will be more at risk. Thinning glaciers withdraw support from the steep rock faces they once buttressed (called the “paraglacial response”, Ballantyne 2002), meltwater reaches previously dry failure planes, and warming permafrost loses the ice cement that held fractured rock together.

Its also worth listening to what experts have been saying about the event. Kristen Cook of Grenoble Alpes University told Scientific American that “it’s difficult to conclusively link a single event directly to climate change. We know it’s getting warmer in the Himalaya.” Dan Shugar, who led the Chamoli study, was cautious on this event’s specific cause while noting he is “100 percent” certain climate change will make such events more likely, “by some combination of glacier melt, permafrost thaw, and changes to precipitation and temperature patterns.”

Confident claims that climate change caused this disaster are getting ahead of the evidence. But at the same time, confident claims that it played no role ignore the rapid changes that we’ve observed in the area around where the mountain failed.

What are the takeaways here?

This is a humanitarian catastrophe, and the immediate causes of the enormous death toll include things like villages and infrastructure concentrated along narrow river corridors, a debris flow that covered 100 km, and limited warning systems that have little to do with climate change. As with other extreme events, we shouldn’t let debates about attribution distract from the urgent need to reduce vulnerability.

It is clearly premature to attribute the collapse itself to climate change. Given the messy causality of rock-ice avalanches, a definitive single-event attribution may never be possible. We will likely see careful forensic studies to be published over the next year or two (as happened after Chamoli), and I’d treat any confident causal claim made this week (in either direction) with a lot of skepticism.

But the broader context is not in doubt. The collapse happened on a mountain warming at around 0.29C per decade in summer, immediately after four consecutive summers that all rank among the five warmest in an 86-year record, during an August that was running warmer than any complete August on record, in a valley that has lost ice at an accelerating pace, and in a region where human influence is very likely the main driver of glacier retreat.

High Mountain Asia already has more people exposed to glacier flood hazards than anywhere else on Earth, and projections suggest the Hindu Kush Himalaya could lose a large fraction of its remaining ice this century, with losses scaling with emissions (Rounce et al 2023). The ice that holds these mountains together is being lost, and every tenth of a degree of additional warming pushes these systems further outside the conditions in which the region’s settlements, trails, and hydropower plants were built.

So when people ask whether climate change caused the disaster in Nepal, the answer is that we don’t know, and we may never know for this specific event. But if the question is whether a warming climate is making disasters like this one more likely in the Himalayas, the literature and essentially every scientist working on these hazards point in the same direction.

I’ve included a more detailed methods writeup and code to reproduce this analysis on my GitHub here.

1 A single 0.25° ERA5 grid cell in terrain this steep is an imperfect measure of the temperatures at the glacier itself; the grid cell spans valley floors around 1,400 m to the 7,200 m summit, with a mean elevation of 4,322 m. Early reports put the failure zone above 5,000 m. Absolute temperatures at the failure zone are substantially colder than the cell average, but anomalies and trends should be more consistent across elevations (if anything we’d expect slightly faster warming at higher elevations). ERA5 also has some limitations in the High Mountain Asia region before the satellite era (pre-1979), so I’d put less weight on individual early extremes than on the long-term trend.

2 For what it’s worth, the partial 2026 summer (8.0C) sits close to the long-term trend line, well below 2024, so the striking 2026 signal is in the July and August values specifically rather than the summer as a whole.

3 Yala is a small, debris-free, relatively low-elevation glacier that is known to lose mass faster than the regional average, and it is not a direct proxy for the hanging glaciers on Langtang Lirung’s north face. I’m showing it because it is the closest long-running measured glacier to the collapse site.