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Clean power shields China from oil shock more than any other country
China’s rapidly-expanding clean energy generation and deepening electrification has made the country more resilient to energy shocks, bolstering its position ahead of the COP31 climate talks in Türkiye, where speeding up the world’s electrification is set to dominate.
The growth of China’s renewable energy capacity protected it from the economic fallout from the energy crisis triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, according to analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) published on Thursday.
As oil and gas stopped flowing through the key fossil fuel trade route, leading prices to soar, China’s crude oil imports – the largest in the world – fell sharply, leading the country to start drawing down on its reserves and curbing its exports of petroleum products.
“Yet, the import reduction did not produce the economic and social disruption in China one might normally expect from a shock of this scale,” the report found.
As temporary adjustment cushioned the oil-import shock, clean power and the electrification of the transport sector buffered the economic costs.
The rise of renewable energy and nuclear power have reduced China’s fossil fuel imports bill by more than $9 billion since 2020, more than any other country, according to CREA.
“China remains exposed to imported fuels, particularly where oil is used as a chemical feedstock, but reducing fossil-fuel demand already contributes to energy security,” said Qi Qin, the report’s author.
The view from Beijing: vindicatedCREA’s analysis found the roll-out of electric vehicles (EVs) displaced 38 million tonnes of oil equivalent between March and August, equivalent to around 13% of China’s crude oil imports in the same period the previous year.
China’s ongoing reliance on coal-fired power plants also protected the country against oil and gas supply disruptions, although coal power generation remained broadly flat in the six months since the start of the Iran war, according to the report.
Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, told Climate home News that China’s all-of-the-above approach to energy development has provided the country with the strategic flexibility to face the oil shock.
“While China has often been criticised in previous years for moving too slowly away from coal, this year’s global energy market volatility has given Chinese policymakers a renewed sense of confidence. There is a growing sentiment in Beijing that recent events have vindicated China’s energy strategy as both prudent and pragmatic,” he said.
Can China support the electrification pledge?Despite its vast cleantech build-out and rapid electrification boosting its energy resilience, China has stopped short of endorsing an initiative by COP31 host Türkiye to increase the global share of electricity to 35% in final energy use by 2035.
Li Gao, vice minister at the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, who will lead the Chinese delegation at COP31, told a press conference the electrification target was in line with Chinese policy. “We believe that increasing electrification levels will help promote a green and low-carbon energy transition and address climate change,” he said.
China’s position on the electrification initiative is one of the major questions hanging over the COP31 talks beginning in Antalya next week.
“What is clear is that China has the most to gain from accelerated electrification because of their manufacturing capabilities,” said Bruce Douglas, CEO of the Global Renewables Alliance.
In 2026 alone, China’s exports of solar panels, batteries, EV and other cleantech are on track to avoid emissions equivalent to Brazil’s annual emissions.
Türkiye’s proposal doesn’t include a commitment to produce the power from clean energy, nor does it explicitly link electrification to the transition away from fossil fuels – issues on which the EU has signalled it is ready to push back.
But Chinese analysts say Beijing is unlikely to support linking a global electrification goal to commitments on phasing out fossil fuels.
Former French climate envoy Laurence Tubiana, the outgoing CEO of the European Climate Foundation, told Climate Home News that the EU and developed countries such as Brazil – which is influential within the BRICS group of large emerging economies – have a responsibility to push China to show leadership in the talks.
Driving the world’s electrificationThe electrification of the Chinese economy has outpaced that of any other major economy.
In the US and the EU, the share of electrification has stagnated just above 20%. In China, it has doubled since 2005, reaching close to 30% in 2025.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects China will remain the single largest driver of global electricity demand growth through to 2030, as it electrifies its manufacturing sector as well as growing demand for cooling and EV charging.
Over the next five years, the IEA forecasts that China will increase its electricity consumption by as much as the total electricity consumption of the EU today.
In August, the Chinese government set a target to boost the share of electricity in its final energy consumption to 35% by 2030 – five years ahead of Türkiye’s proposed goal.
From laggard to frontrunnerClean-power growth and electrification could meet all of China’s rising power demand, according to CREA. By 2030, this would mean renewable and nuclear energy could reach 54% of power generation – exceeding China’s target to generate half its electricity from non-fossil sources by the end of the decade.
Clean electricity already met all of China’s demand growth in 2025. “The challenge lies in sustaining such growth over several years,” said Qin.
From Beijing’s perspective, the global targets such as the electrification pledge “no longer appear particularly ambitious or threatening”, said Li, of the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“China, long perceived as a climate laggard, is increasingly moving ahead of countries in the Global North. A global ceiling target is increasingly only a floor for China,” he emphasised.
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COP30 adaptation pledge would meet under a third of poorer nations’ needs, UN warns
International funding to help developing countries protect their communities, infrastructure and economies from climate impacts remains far below what is needed, a new United Nations report has found, leaving vulnerable nations increasingly exposed as global warming heads past 1.5C.
The UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) 2026 Adaptation Gap Report estimates that developing countries will need about $305 billion a year to adapt by 2035 in today’s prices, or around $420 billion once inflation is taken into account. Yet international public adaptation finance from developed countries reached only $28.2-31.7 billion in 2024, a modest increase on the previous year.
The estimate is slightly below last year’s $310-365 billion, mainly because UNEP now relies more on countries’ own assessment of costs reported through their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and national adaptation plans (NAPs).
UN secretary-general António Guterres said the gap in adaptation finance is not measured in money alone but in the lives, livelihoods and futures that are lost in the process.
He called on developed countries to deliver “fast, simple, accessible support” to vulnerable countries, adding that development banks must also scale up their financing. “We know who is most at risk. We know what works. What is missing is the money and the political will. The choice is simple – invest in adaptation today or pay for catastrophe tomorrow,” he said.
At COP30 last year, countries agreed to at least triple adaptation finance for developing nations by 2035. Depending on whether that is measured from current flows or from the $40 billion that rich nations were meant to reach in 2025 under an earlier pledge, tripling would deliver $85-120 billion a year. Even if it is achieved, UNEP says, that would cover only 20-29% of developing countries’ needs in 2035.
The report warns the pledge may be less ambitious than it looks. The COP30 decision sets no baseline year, does not adjust for inflation and allows money that developing countries channel through multilateral development banks (MDBs) to count towards the target. Taking all of this into account, developed countries’ own contribution in 2035 could be as low as $45-66 billion a year in 2025 prices.
“The world is not ready to adapt to current climatic conditions, never mind what overshoot of 1.5°C will bring,” said Inger Andersen, UNEP executive director, calling on governments to intensify efforts to increase adaptation finance.
Global South countries step upWhile funding from rich nations flatlines, adaptation finance flowing between developing countries is growing, though it is nowhere near enough to close the gap.
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The UNEP report estimates that developing countries contributed $9.65 billion towards international public adaptation finance in 2024, more than double the $3.81 billion recorded in 2019. That is about a quarter of all international public adaptation finance.
The report does not break the figure down by country. “These are voluntary contributions that capacitated developing countries provide via their shares in the MDBs but also through direct South-South cooperation,” said Henry Neufeldt, the report’s lead author, at a press conference on Wednesday.
Fatima Denton, the report’s co-author, said it is “comforting” to see South-South learning and cooperation because countries with similar ecosystems face similar challenges.
Loss and damage mountingWithout stronger action to cut emissions and adapt, climate-related losses and damages will keep rising, the report says, overwhelming the limited resources of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), whose complex procedures also make support hard to access.
Last month, the fund’s board agreed to set aside $20 million for Nepal’s recovery from the devastating climate-driven flood it suffered in August. It is the first money the fund has allocated since its creation, but Nepali officials called the sum symbolic against estimated recovery costs of $4.8 billion. Nepal must now submit a proposal setting out how it will use the money.
The FRLD has yet to approve any projects from its first funding round, when it received nearly 180 submissions, requiring around $2.8 billion – an amount that dwarfed the around $350 million available to allocate.
Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources
Mattias Söderberg, global climate lead at DanChurchAid, said the risk of loss and damage grows when adaptation falls short, as communities become more exposed to increasingly severe climate impacts.
“When we fail to invest in adaptation today, we risk paying a much higher price tomorrow. And that price is not only measured in dollars. It is measured in lives lost, homes destroyed and futures taken away,” Söderberg added.
A failure to match climate ambitionAhead of COP31 starting on Monday in Antalya, climate campaigners are calling on rich governments to set out how to close the remaining gap and meet developing countries’ full adaptation needs.
Pooja Dave, adaptation lead at Climate Action Network International, said COP31 must agree a credible plan to deliver at least US$120 billion a year in adaptation finance well before 2035, through new and additional public, grant-based funding that reaches the communities most at risk.
“People have a right to a climate safe world and protection from climate impacts. Adaptation is not charity. It is a legal and moral obligation,” Dave said.
Mohamed Adow, director of Kenya-based climate change think tank Power Shift Africa, said COP31 must establish a clear starting point, milestones and a credible delivery plan, especially on how public finance, in the form of grants not loans, must reach those most at risk
“Communities facing floods and droughts cannot wait until 2035 to find out what this promise means,” he said.
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The great disaster divide: How the super-rich are profiting from global climate suffering
Alex Maitland, Nafkote Dabi and Pubudini Wickramaratne work on climate and inequality for Oxfam International.
Few places on Earth have escaped the deadly effects of climate breakdown in 2026. In the early half of the year, devastating floods swept through Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and other West African countries while August flash floods in Nepal, caused by a glacier collapse, affected over 80,000 people.
India endured a prolonged extreme heatwave in May, followed by the weakest monsoon in 20 years. Excess deaths from the European heatwaves are likely to have topped 50,000. And 2026 is on track to be one of the hottest years on record.
The effects of these disasters have not been caused nor felt equally. Disasters discriminate: the less you have, the more you stand to lose.
While everyday people died in heatwaves, the super-rich built snow rooms in their mansions. As families fled from wildfires, the rich were evacuated by helicopter to five-star hotels. As flash floods wiped out entire villages, luxury properties stood protected by high-end private flood defence systems.
What’s even more galling is that the same people that have done the most to drive climate chaos can pay to insulate themselves from its effects and are now finding new ways to profit from disaster.
Oxfam’s latest report “Disaster Divide” sets out exactly how climate breakdown is deepening inequality and enriching a tiny few.
Unequal emissionsBillionaires and the super-rich are destroying the planet at a wildly disproportionate rate. The richest 0.1% (roughly 8 million people) emit more carbon than the poorest 3.5 billion people, almost half of humanity.
There is perhaps no starker symbol of wasteful emissions than travel by private jet. Every two seconds, the world’s private jets pump out more carbon than someone in the poorest 50% of the world will emit in an entire year.
But the climate impacts of the super-rich go far beyond their luxury lifestyles. How they invest their fortunes helps determine which high-carbon infrastructure gets built.
About 70% of billionaire investments are in “high climate-impact sectors” such as oil, gas or chemicals. The economic damage linked to individual billionaires’ investments can run into billions of dollars. Mexican oligarch Carlos Slim’s investments, for example, caused $3.7 billion of environmental damage in 2024, and French fashion titan Bernard Arnault, owner of Louis Vuitton, was responsible for $1.7 billion in damage, our calculations show.
Emissions of the rich drive climate disastersFor the first time, Oxfam combines the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI)’s carbon inequality data with climate attribution models to link the emissions of the super-rich to extreme weather events.
The richest 1% are responsible for 20% of global warming since 1990, 100 times more per person, than someone in the poorest half of humanity.
The data also shows how the rich increase the likelihood of extreme heat occurring: a person from the richest 0.1% has contributed 125 times more than the average person to extreme heat events.
Inequality is what turns extreme weather events into disaster. In more unequal countries, disasters cause higher death tolls, inflict greater damage and affect more people.
Inequality also determines who can survive, endure and recover. A study of floods in Mumbai, India, found that lower-income households had to spend 15 times more than rich households to repair and replace damaged assets.
Billionaires escape climate consequencesClimate impacts are also deeply unequal along gender lines. A review of 130 studies found that women and girls were more affected than men and boys by climate-related health impacts in 68% of cases. Climate disasters exacerbate pre-existing gender inequality: gender-based violence increases during and after extreme weather events, with two-thirds of studies identifying increases in intimate partner or domestic violence following floods, storms or droughts.
“Coordinated backlash”: Activists say COP30 gender spat reflects wider threat
For millions of people, the consequences of climate chaos go further still: being forced to leave their homes and communities. UN Migration projects that, if the international community fails to act, as many as 1 billion people (around 10% of the world’s population) will have been displaced by 2050. The majority of those displaced will be in the Global South, but rich people are quietly joining their ranks.
Billionaires are buying islands and building fortified compounds and underground bunkers — tech billionaires are increasingly at the forefront of this trend. This is a form of climate apartheid: the super-rich use their wealth and power to escape the consequences of the crises they largely helped create.
Destroying the food systemClimate change is lowering food production and pushing food prices higher. Low-income households are more exposed to high food prices because it makes up the greatest share of their overall spending. People in low- or lower-middle-income countries spend almost three times as much of their income on food as people in high-income countries.
Some of the richest people in the world and their corporations are directly benefiting, exploiting rising food prices and uneven food production to reap large profits.
In 2024, extreme weather damaged West African cocoa harvests, resulting in prices jumping around 230% year-on-year but accruing no gains to cocoa farmers. The same year, heavy rains in Indonesia and droughts in Brazil and Vietnam contributed to a surge in coffee prices, with a 39% increase on the previous year’s average. Coffee-trading corporations, the intermediary traders of the supply chains, made huge profits as a result.
A farmer walks on his cocoa farm in Gabeadji near San Pedro, Ivory Coast, January 31, 2023. (Photo: Reuters/Ange Aboa) A farmer walks on his cocoa farm in Gabeadji near San Pedro, Ivory Coast, January 31, 2023. (Photo: Reuters/Ange Aboa) Profiting from disasterCorporations have long made massive amounts of money from wrecking the planet. Now, the wreckage itself is becoming a lucrative market. The global disaster recovery market is forecast to grow from $70 billion to $92 billion a year by 2029, driven in part by increasingly frequent climate-related extreme weather events.
Often, the very same people profiting from fuelling climate breakdown are also cashing in on disaster clean-ups. To investigate this trend, Oxfam created a sample of 217 corporations which profit from business activities that either drive climate disasters, build resilience before they hit, or work on repairing the damage. We coined it the “Destroy and Rebuild” Index.
The corporations in the “Destroy and Rebuild” Index made $1.8 billion on average in 2025, paying out more than $1 billion on average to their shareholders. Ten asset managers have investments in over 90% of these corporations, with BlackRock and Vanguard invested in 92% of the corporations in the index: the pair’s total investments in these companies exceed$1 trillion.
Coalition set sights on taxing luxury air travel to fund climate action
The lengths the super-rich go to exploit disasters doesn’t stop at cynical profiteering. Recovery efforts have also been used to push through the privatisation of public services and deregulation, reshaping communities in ways that benefit private interests rather than the people affected.
After Hurricane Irma devastated Barbuda in 2017, reconstruction made way for luxury residences and a golf course on land that included natural coastlines and wetlands. This restricted access to the sea for many fisherfolk and local people. In Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria’s aftermath was used to advance the privatisation of the island’s electrical grid. Since then, the grid has suffered widespread failures, including a blackout in April 2022 that left the entire country without power.
A man stands in a home where the roof was ripped apart, in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, in St. Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica, July 5, 2024. REUTERS/Maria Alejandra Cardona A man stands in a home where the roof was ripped apart, in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, in St. Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica, July 5, 2024. REUTERS/Maria Alejandra Cardona Make rich polluters payClimate breakdown is the result of political choices and an economic system that protects the wealth and power of polluters while leaving others to pay the price. This is neither just nor sustainable. It must change.
Governments meeting at COP31 must commit to curb the excessive emissions of the super-rich through taxes on wealth, income and carbon-intensive luxury consumption, like private jets and mega-yachts. These measures will help generate the public climate finance urgently needed for Global South countries to adapt, recover and rebuild without being pushed deeper into debt.
Governments must also draw a hard line against disaster capitalism, refusing to let corporations turn human suffering into shareholder value.
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COP31 must deliver finance for Africa or there will be no implementation
Nana Antwi-Boasiako Amoah is chair of the African Group of Negotiators on Climate Change. Charles Wanguhu is director of the Enzi Ijayo Africa Initiative and Africa Futures Policy Hub.
A COP held in Africa does not automatically deliver for Africa. That matters now, with COP31 in Antalya ahead and COP32 in Addis Ababa on the horizon. What counts is not where the world gathers, or what it pledges, but whether climate finance reaches African countries on terms they can use.
Without real progress on finance and implementation at Antalya, an African-hosted COP will simply inherit the same unmet promises.
Africa accounts for about 4% of global emissions, yet carries a wildly disproportionate share of the cost, losing an estimated 2%-5% of GDP each year to climate extremes, money pulled from classrooms and clinics into disaster response.
The finance meant to help it adapt arrives in a trickle. Developing countries will need an estimated $305 billion a year for adaptation alone by 2035, according to the latest UN Adaptation Gap Report. In 2024, international public adaptation finance stood at $28 billion-$32 billion, just a $1 billion increase over the previous year. That gap is the difference between plans on paper and protection on the ground.
Predictable, grant-based fundingThe problem is not only how much, but on what terms. Too much arrives as loans rather than grants, deepening a debt burden that already crowds out spending on essentials in health, education and multipliers of development like affordable and accessible energy. The cost of capital has become the real tax on African ambition. A fairer financial system is not charity. It is the precondition for delivery.
So, Africa comes to Antalya with a collective strong proposition. This is no longer a slogan: across the continent, states are building shared positions and common pavilions, learning to bargain as a bloc. We will press for finance that is predictable and grant-based, and for adaptation finance to be at least tripled, to around $120 billion a year by 2035. Even that would fall short of what the continent actually needs.
The goal this forms part of, which was agreed at the Baku COP – $300 billion a year – is a floor, not a ceiling; the real benchmark is the $1.3 trillion from all sources sketched out in the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap. And we will ask for direct access, so resources reach the institutions and communities that must use them, and for mechanisms that track whether commitments are met.
Powering green industrialisationFinance is not an end in itself. Pledges become results when finance builds economies, creates jobs and strengthens productive capacity – the grids, the processing and the skills that let African economies add value to what they produce rather than exporting it raw.
Here we should be honest with ourselves. Value addition is an energy story before it is a minerals story. There is little point in curbing raw exports if there is no reliable power to run the smelter. Credibility means pairing the call to process at home with a plan to power it.
Other enablers of a just transition become crucial. Trade, for instance, can be an enabler of a low-carbon transition by facilitating the exchange of low-carbon goods. However, it has increasingly become a hindrance, particularly for African countries.
The use of unilateral trade measures has disproportionate impacts on market access and industrial capabilities, consigning African countries to the export of raw materials. The poor sequencing of these measures and lack of flexibilities, exemptions and targeted support are likely to cause harm.
At COP31, we will push for an agenda item on trade to create a specific space as an enabler of systematic discussion on the impact of trade‑related climate measures.
Communities at the tableThis is where the design of co-operation matters as much as its scale. The proposed Just Transition Mechanism should be country-led and grant-based, so it adds capacity rather than debt. It should fund the things that make diversification real – reliable power (smarter grids and delivery networks), local processing, and the skills to run them – and it should put workers and affected communities at the table, not merely in the communiqué. Get that design right, and diversification builds new industries and jobs rather than leaving communities behind.
Antalya opens into a vacuum in global climate leadership. Africa can help fill it, not with grievance but with a credible voice on delivery and finance. An implementation COP must be judged by implementation.
The question is plain. Does the finance follow the ambition, and does it reach the economies and the people who need it? Africa will be watching the answer.
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India builds deep-sea capacity in bet on critical minerals future
At India’s ocean technology institute in Chennai, scientists have been developing a range of hi-tech mining equipment that can operate 5 or 6 kilometres underwater – from a remote-control submarine to a seabed soil tester and slurry pump.
Their task: to ensure that India is ready if deep-sea mining takes off by building the technology and knowledge about how – and where – critical minerals can be extracted from the depths of the ocean, even as dozens of nations call for a moratorium on this activity.
After a series of successful deep-water equipment tests in recent years, government officials say big strides have been made.
“(India) has made significant progress in building the scientific and technological foundations for deep-sea mining,” a spokesperson for the Ministry of Earth Sciences, which oversees the institute, told Climate Home News.
Deep-sea ambitionsHighlighting the country’s ambitions, it signed a second contract last year with the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body that regulates the deep ocean floor, to explore polymetallic sulphides, which contain minerals such as copper and zinc – key ingredients in clean energy technologies such as wind turbines and storage batteries.
Besides the two polymetallic sulphide contracts, it holds an ISA exploration contract for polymetallic nodules in the Central Indian Ocean Basin. China and South Korea are the only other countries with three ISA exploration contracts directly under government control.
Greenpeace activists hold a protest demanding an end to deep-sea mining, in Prague, Czech Republic, June 1, 2023. REUTERS/David W Cerny Greenpeace activists hold a protest demanding an end to deep-sea mining, in Prague, Czech Republic, June 1, 2023. REUTERS/David W CernyYet deep-sea mining is controversial for its potential impacts on the ocean floor, a little-studied, undisturbed ecosystem that should be protected by a precautionary pause on the activity, marine scientists say.
A coalition of 46 countries is pushing for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, until enough scientific evidence shows the ecosystem impacts can be reduced.
Despite this push, ISA contract-holders are still racing to develop the technical capabilities to mine the ocean floor, betting that commercial-scale operations will eventually be permitted and prove economically viable. India, an emerging clean-tech powerhouse, does not want to fall behind competitors, government officials told Climate Home News.
Since India obtained its first ISA exploration contract more than two decades ago, extensive survey work has been undertaken in the 75,000-square-km contract area in the Central Indian Ocean Basin, which is estimated to hold hundreds of millions of tonnes of polymetallic nodule resources, according to the Indian government.
More recently, survey work has identified several potential locations in the polymetallic sulphide areas.
The seabed survey work and the deep-sea mining tools being developed in Chennai put India among only a small group of countries to have made such progress. China is another leader in mapping the ocean floor for potential mineral resources that could one day be extracted.
At a meeting in Jamaica in July, the ISA continued negotiations on rules for commercial deep-sea mining but failed to adopt the Mining Code. Delegates agreed that further work had to be carried out to resolve outstanding issues, with the ISA tasked with devising a roadmap towards hopeful adoption.
A view shows an active venting chimney at the Jan Mayen Vent Fields on the Arctic Mid-Oceanic Ridge and a lot of white microbial mats cover the chimney, at a depth of around 500 metres, in this undated handout picture. University of Bergen, Centre for Deep Sea Research/Handout via REUTERS A view shows an active venting chimney at the Jan Mayen Vent Fields on the Arctic Mid-Oceanic Ridge and a lot of white microbial mats cover the chimney, at a depth of around 500 metres, in this undated handout picture. University of Bergen, Centre for Deep Sea Research/Handout via REUTERS Technical and regulatory hurdlesEven if a regulatory framework is established, commercial development remains a distant prospect in the exploration contract areas awarded to India by the ISA, government officials and experts say.
“There is still quite a distance to be covered to convert the resource to reserves,” the ministry spokesperson said.
Pradeep Singh, an ocean governance expert at the Oceano Azul Foundation, a Portugal-based international nonprofit, described India’s deep-sea mining programme as being firmly in “an exploratory phase”.
“There is still a lot more work left to be done in order to achieve sustained extraction technology, address operational hurdles (such as shipboard processing and trans-shipment), and develop onshore refining,” Singh told Climate Home News.
“It would also appear, from publicly available information, that none of the programmes will be ready to move into the exploitation phase anytime soon,” Singh added.
Deep-sea real estateInstead, the government’s longer-term vision for India’s ISA contracts is centred on “a combination of mineral/resource security, indigenous technology development, scientific capability and eventual industrial readiness”, the ministry spokesperson said.
London talks raise hopes for green shipping deal
But for as long as deep-sea mining remains commercially unviable, Singh said securing exploratory licences may be more about “real estate and as a projection of dominance”.
“The competition at the moment – if any – is more about investing in deep-sea operational capabilities rather than mineral resource extraction itself (which is currently not competitive),” Singh said.
Threat to ocean biodiversityIn tandem with India’s deep-sea mineral survey work, years of research by government environmental scientist Dr. Rengaiyan Periasamy on Indian Ocean ridges highlight the risks that future deep-sea mining poses to ocean biodiversity.
“Our studies have led to the discovery of more than 10 new species,” Periasamy told Climate Home News from the Kochi-based Centre for Marine Living Resources & Ecology, which also operates under the Ministry of Earth Sciences.
They warn that deep-sea mining could cause habitat destruction, persistent sediment plumes and disruption of ecosystem processes throughout the water column, with potentially irreversible impacts occurring before many species and ecosystems are fully understood.
Iridogorgia and bamboo coral pictured around the Johnston Atoll Unit of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument (Photo: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research) Iridogorgia and bamboo coral pictured around the Johnston Atoll Unit of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument (Photo: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research)Major fisheries could also be severely impacted, according to campaigners.
“No country has conducted enough scientific research to capture the full scope of environmental impacts of deep-sea mining,” said a spokesperson for the Deep-Sea Conservation Coalition, an international environmental advocacy group focused on protecting deep-ocean ecosystems.
“We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about any deep-sea environment,” the spokesperson added.
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COP30 roadmap says faster use of existing tools can halt forest loss by 2030
Brazil’s COP30 presidency has unveiled a much-anticipated plan to halt forest loss around the world, saying a global target to end deforestation by 2030 remains within reach using existing national and international tools, but requires more finance behind it and everyone to go “faster and further”.
COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago told a press conference to launch the new roadmap in Brasilia that, while some countries pushed back against a global blueprint, it was developed as a way to inspire governments, business and civil society to focus on meeting commitments to protect forests.
“It’s all processes that already exist. All instruments that already exist. That’s one of the best conclusions: everyone can start acting today,” do Lago said.
The voluntary deforestation roadmap, along with another on transitioning away from fossil fuels, was promised by Brazil in the final hours of last year’s COP30 in the Amazon city of Belém after countries could not agree to include it in the formal Mutirão outcome.
Do Lago reiterated on Tuesday that the roadmap is not an official UN document, but rather a guide to implement targets already agreed three years ago at COP28 in Dubai, when countries took stock of national climate policies and agreed to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030.
Last year, global deforestation declined by 15% – the largest drop in recent years, achieved in large part thanks to Brazil’s tougher enforcement against illegal expansion of cattle-ranching – but countries remain far off track for the drop needed to achieve the COP28 target.
Former Brazilian environment minister Marina Silva, a close ally of newly re-elected President Lula da Silva and one of the main advocates of the roadmap, celebrated its launch and described it as “not a new path but a new way of walking” towards the global goal.
What’s included in the roadmap?The roadmap compiles a menu of policies to reverse deforestation and restore the world’s forests at both the national and international level, informed by more than 180 contributions from governments, civil society, the private sector and others. It focuses on ways countries can ramp up forest conservation, sustainable management and restoration, while tackling deforestation and forest degradation.
At the country level, it urges each government to follow a four-point plan, starting with identifying the drivers of deforestation in its territory, adjusting existing policies such as climate and biodiversity plans to address those drivers, setting targets according to available resources, and then implementing measures to reach them.
At the international level, it urges countries to co-operate on diverting trade-related incentives away from forest-destructive activities, and to strengthen prosecution of cross-border environmental crimes at the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime (UNTOC). It also calls for collaboration on forest monitoring platforms and developing unified indicators for tracking progress.
The document also identifies the next UN Global Stocktake of climate policies in 2028 as a key milestone when countries will have a last chance to review forest policies before the end of the decade.
Do Lago said some countries might want the roadmap to become a contribution to the next stocktake, adding that this document is “the first contribution for that discussion”, which will start at COP31 in Antalya and continue until COP33.
COP30 President André Aranha Corrêa do Lago looks over documents at the UN mid-year climate talks in Bonn, Germany on June 11, 2026 (Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth) Finance boost neededTo achieve the 2030 global target, the roadmap also says a major scale-up of financial resources will be required. The UN estimates that $84.5 billion was channelled into forest protection in 2023, which will need to increase to more than $300 billion a year by 2030. Nearly 90% of finance going to forests comes from domestic government budgets in developing countries, rather than international aid or private-sector investment.
The roadmap suggests that, since countries are already paying to look after their forests, they can act in two main ways: diverting domestic support away from nature-damaging activities, and building demand for “verified forest outcomes” such as paying to keep forests standing or creating forest-positive subsidies.
In the case of international finance, the document identifies several initiatives seeking to channel new public and private funds towards forest protection, including paying for carbon sinks – known as REDD+ in technical jargon – as well as through the newly established Paris Agreement carbon market.
The roadmap also singles out recent efforts to shift more private finance into solutions for nature, such as the Brazil-led Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) launched last year in Belém.
“The great challenge is not new policies, but scalability and acceleration to arrive at 2030 as promised, having ramped up efforts to end deforestation and forest degradation,” COP30 CEO and veteran climate diplomat Ana Toni said at the press conference.
Timeline requires quick implementationDamian Fleming, senior director for forests at green group WWF International, said the roadmap “gets many of the fundamentals right” including on governance, regulatory and legal enforcement, community rights, finance, and the need to tackle degradation as well as deforestation.
However, he added that “the challenge now is speed” with 2030 just a few years away. “Countries need to use [the roadmap] to turbocharge action for results on the ground,” he said, urging governments to pursue deforestation-free supply chains and respect the rights of Indigenous peoples.
Anders Haug Larsen, director of international advocacy at the Rainforest Foundation Norway, highlighted the wide range of partners that can drive the anti-deforestation plan forward, adding he hoped that rainforest nations would now step up to champion it.
“Tropical forests are too important for fragmented approaches,” he said. “The roadmap can help bring together governments, Indigenous Peoples, investors and existing initiatives behind a common goal: ending deforestation and keeping forests standing.”
Natalie Unterstell, founder of the Talanoa Institute, a Brazilian climate think-tank, said the roadmap builds on Brazil’s “successful experience” of reducing deforestation, which has dropped to a record-low level, going beyond a simple focus on law enforcement but also identifying business and finance opportunities that bring positive results.
“The next step is for other governments and incoming COP presidencies to take ownership of this agenda, turn the proposed pathways into co-ordinated action, and use the 2028 Global Stocktake to assess collective progress. With only four years left, the roadmap needs a coalition of countries committed to delivering it,” she told Climate Home News.
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Brazil’s fossil fuel roadmap sketches out first global timetable
Brazil has proposed a voluntary timetable to speed up the world’s transition away from fossil fuels (TAFF), fulfilling the promise it made to draw up the first global roadmap at last year’s UN climate summit in Belém.
Through a “TAFF Mutirão”, named after the Indigenous Brazilian term for collective effort, the COP30 presidency sets out three stages for cutting the world’s reliance on oil, gas and coal up to 2033.
Countries are first encouraged to draw up national transition plans by 2028 in time to feed into the next global stocktake, the UN’s five-yearly review of progress on climate action. During the same period, Brazil’s blueprint suggests governments could take early steps such as reforming fossil fuel subsidies or stopping methane leaks at oil and gas sites.
In 2029 and 2030, Brazil sees the focus shifting to building an alternative energy system, by prioritising clean power, electric transport and heating, more efficient energy use and by rolling out the power grids and batteries that support them.
Only in the final stage, from 2031 to 2033, does the roadmap expect the main push to reduce fossil fuel production. By then, it argues, falling use of fossil fuels should allow producers to “adjust and diversify supply in step with demand”.
The roadmap acknowledges that fossil fuel demand must fall “substantially faster” to meet the 1.5C temperature goal, but warns that cutting supply too early would drive up prices and risk “losing societal support for the transition”.
Coordinated agendaPedro Brancante, a senior official at the Brazilian Foreign Ministry and one of the authors of the roadmap, said the document proposes both a global, coordinated agenda and accelerated action at the national level.
He told a webinar hosted by Climate Home News that Brazil sees the roadmap as a tool to organise the discussions around the fossil fuel phase-out and help that debate develop further without getting stuck on definitions or the different responsibilities of particular countries.
The COP30 presidency offered to draw up the roadmap in the dying hours of the Belém summit. A push by about 80 countries to start that work within the formal negotiations had been blocked by some fossil fuel-producing nations.
The 182-page document does not name any countries and it sets no deadlines for winding down fossil fuel production. But it offers countries a self-assessment tool to score themselves on how heavily they depend on fossil fuels and what capacity they have to move away from them.
Fossil fuel “archetypes”Across energy demand, supply and the wider economy, countries can place themselves in one of 12 “archetypes”, each with its own suggested first steps.
For example, countries where transport, industry and homes still run mostly on fossil fuels, and where energy demand is growing fast, are urged to meet that growth with electric and other low-emissions options rather than locking in new fossil fuel use. Major oil and gas producers with strong institutions and good renewable resources are told to manage an “orderly transition” of their production while expanding clean energy, then to redirect their infrastructure and skills toward new energy industries.
COP30 President André Aranha Corrêa do Lago told journalists on Tuesday that countries need to recognise themselves in the categories and use the frameworks as “food for thought” to plan the next steps.
COP30 CEO Ana Toni added that the presidency limited its time horizon to 2033 and did not try to think about 2050 or 2060 because “there is an urgency and these are short-term measures” that all countries can act upon now.
Lula’s election win in Brazil raises hopes for zero deforestation drive
Brazil has yet to publish its own national roadmap away from fossil fuels. At the end of last year, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva asked his government to draft the roadmap’s guidelines by February 2026, but officials said on Tuesday that the document is still awaiting approval from the President.
Lula, who was recently re-elected, has backed the expansion of oil and gas exploration. In August, after Petrobras struck oil off the coast near the mouth of the Amazon River, he said drilling along Brazil’s northern coast could be “a passport to the country’s future”.
“Valuable blueprint”The release of the roadmap was largely welcomed by analysts and campaigners.
Romain Ioualalen, global policy lead at Oil Change International, said Brazil has offered “a valuable blueprint” for the fossil fuel phase-out, adding that while “there is not one-size-fits-all pathway”, all countries need to plan their transition now.
But he warned that suggesting that a reduction in fossil fuel supply could wait until the 2030s would be “a grave mistake” and guarantee a “chaotic transition”.
Smoke rises from Yatagan thermal power plant near southwestern town of Yatagan in Mugla province, Turkey, February 24, 2021. (Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas) Smoke rises from Yatagan thermal power plant near southwestern town of Yatagan in Mugla province, Turkey, February 24, 2021. (Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas)Kat Paterson, programme lead for global clean power diplomacy at E3G, said the roadmap puts the fossil fuel transition at the heart of both global climate cooperation and national economic planning.
“As governments head to Antalya, the task is now for the COP31 presidency to carry Brazil’s work forward, and for countries to demonstrate their own plans to develop national roadmaps as pathways towards clean, resilient economies,” she added.
Turkey, which hosts COP31 from next Monday, and Australia, which will preside over the negotiations, have not said whether or how they will take the roadmap forward at the summit.
At the press conference in Brasilia, the Brazilian officials stressed that the roadmap represents a call for action and not a formal document that needs to be adopted in the official talks.
“We are not suggesting negotiations, we are not suggesting the creation of a new entity,” said Corrêa do Lago. “Everything is around implementation, around institutions and processes in place that already exist and have been agreed beforehand.”
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Africa launches long-delayed energy bank to finance fossil fuel projects
After repeated delays, the Africa Energy Bank (AEB) was officially launched this week – tasked with financing oil and gas projects across the continent as global lenders retreat from such investments due to climate concerns.
Even as the world aims to transition away from fossil fuels, many African leaders have made clear they want to continue exploring and extracting the continent’s large oil and gas deposits – estimated at about 125 billion barrels of crude and more than 600 trillion cubic feet of gas – to fund economic development.
“The creation of the Africa Energy Bank reaffirms African governments’ determination to secure their own energy future,” said a statement announcing the institution’s launch at a meeting in Abuja, adding that the bank’s founders believed oil and gas remained vital to the continent’s energy systems.
The delays to the bank’s launch had raised questions about its momentum and whether it could mobilise investment to finance major African hydrocarbons initiatives in an era of energy transition.
The initial plan for the energy bank – a joint initiative of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization (APPO) and the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) – was to start operations in January 2025, but the bank’s opening was repeatedly pushed back.
Quest for investmentThe bank said it had authorised capital of $5 billion but did not disclose how much of that had been subscribed or paid in by shareholders. It vowed to focus on projects that would help strengthen productive capacity, reduce reliance on imported fuels and promote trade in energy goods across the continent.
It estimates Africa’s energy investment needs at $200 billion, and energy analysts told Climate Home News the institution could struggle to mobilise enough resources to advance large-scale projects.
However, its backers said at the weekend launch that the bank would seek investment from governments, national oil companies, financial institutions and private investors across the continent to ensure that “Africa’s energy future is shaped by Africans”.
African-led approach to energy financingBackers said the bank was needed because many traditional international lenders have curtailed financing for oil and gas projects, potentially hindering a more extended and gradual energy transition advocated by many African leaders as a way to ensure economic and social development.
Chantal Naidoo, executive director at Rabia – a South Africa-based just transition think-tank – said the creation of a bank to invest in fossil fuel projects reflected the complexities of switching to clean energy for African countries – noting the high cost of financing for clean energy projects.
Africa wants adaptation finance on COP31 agenda, raising risk of a fight
At the same time, Naidoo said, the continent is expected to transition within a global system in which the rules are not applied equally – citing recent support for continued oil and gas development by the British and Norwegian governments.
“A binary choice between fossil fuels and renewables does little to address these complexities,” Naidoo said.
“Momentum lies with renewables”But many climate campaigners say the bank should prioritise renewable energy investment as Africa builds out much of its energy system for the first time, fueling growth in solar power.
Data from energy think-tank Ember, published in August, projects that the continent will install a record 17 gigawatts (GW) of solar capacity in 2026 – equal to about 100,000 solar panels every day. This would mark the third consecutive year of record growth, following increases of 51% in 2025 and 25% in 2024.
African governments strengthen waste rules as solar and battery use surges
Joseph Ibrahim, Nigeria campaign director for Secure Energy Project, a global advocacy organisation working to accelerate the energy transition, said Africa receives only about 2% of global clean energy spending, leaving plenty of scope for more.
“A new African energy bank should build on that momentum, not pull scarce public money away from it,” Ibrahim said.
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Canada, EU agree deeper cooperation on energy and cleantech supply chains
Canada and the European Union’s commitment to strengthen cooperation on energy security and the energy transition lays the foundation to put clean growth and climate priorities at the heart of their alliance, according to experts.
In a seven-page joint statement agreed at the end of a two-day summit in Montreal on Friday, both sides committed to work more closely on investment in critical minerals, green grids, energy sources, battery storage and the protection of energy infrastructure.
They agreed to assess opportunities for long-term energy connectivity across the Atlantic, including through a feasibility study on liquefied gas (LNG) exports to Europe. The statement also includes a pledge to “deepen targeted industrial cooperation” on technology value chains and “address bilateral trade barriers”.
“Canada and the European Union have sent a clear and unwavering signal that closer cooperation on decarbonisation and climate resilience will be central to their new strategic alliance,” said Canadian Climate Institute president Rick Smith. “The task now is to turn talk into action.”
Foundation for climate actionThe EU and Canada’s “alliance for the future” aims to deepen their partnership across investment, trade and economic security to weather geopolitical tensions and global threats, including “the existential threat of the interdependent crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean and land degradation, and pollution”.
These threats are “increasingly impossible to ignore as the impacts of extreme heat, wildfires, floods, and other disasters become more disruptive and expensive,” Smith said.
The statement reaffirms existing commitments established by the Canada-European Union Green Alliance, which both parties described as “our compass for advancing decarbonisation while also strengthening competitiveness, affordability, and economic security”.
Investment in critical mineralsDuring the summit, the European Investment Bank (EIB) announced a “new chapter” for its presence in Canada, beginning with accelerated investment in critical minerals.
“At a time when both sides of the Atlantic are working to reduce strategic dependencies, we want to turn our partnership into investment in real projects, from mining and processing to recycling,” EIB Vice-President Nicolas Beer said in a statement. “That is how we build supply chains that are not only more secure, but more competitive too.”
Joanna Kyriazis, director of policy and strategy at Clean Energy Canada, welcomed the EIB announcement as a “bright spot of the summit” and “one of the few tangible actions”.
“As the EU and Canada seek to advance a partnership anchored in ensuring mutual security and navigating an uncertain world, it is essential that electrification remains a north star… one of the greatest ways we can advance both short- and long-term affordability, competitiveness, and energy security,” she said.
Feasibility of Canadian LNG exports to the EUIn addition, the agreement calls for a joint long-term feasibility study on LNG exports to Europe, although no immediate investment was announced to support this.
A media briefing circulated by climate advocacy groups in advance of the summit had warned that a call for such a study would support Canada’s efforts to rebrand gas, a highly polluting fossil fuel, as a reliable, low-carbon energy source.
Yet, the agreement was interpreted by some observers as a Canadian concession following more than a year of rhetoric predicting a boom in Canadian gas exports to the EU and elsewhere.
“What is clear is that the EU is reducing its gas consumption drastically,” Adrian Hiel, director of the Brussels-based Electrification Alliance, told the Globe and Mail. “The long-term trend is clear and by the middle of the next decade, Europe should be out of the LNG game.”
Last year, The Energy Mix and Berlin-based Clean Energy Wire reported on mounting doubts that serious European demand for additional gas supplies would ever materialise after Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson touted LNG exports to Germany in “as little as five years”.
Rapprochement on a ‘trade irritant’In the lead-up to the summit, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that Canadian iron, steel, fertiliser and aluminium would not be exempt from carbon tariffs under the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), as it moves toward full implementation in 2034.
The CBAM is a trade tool designed to protect the continent’s domestic industries from competitors in countries with less stringent carbon controls.
Unlike other non-EU members like Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and the UK, Canada is unlikely to be exempted from the CBAM because there are no plans to link its carbon market to Europe’s.
However, at the end of the Montreal summit, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told a press conference they had made progress on finding joint solutions to the issue, which von der Leyen described as a “trade irritant”.
Canada’s EU ambassador, Jonathan Wilkinson, formerly the environment and climate minister, said Canada sees it as a problem that the CBAM “did not acknowledge Canadian producers were doing their part to reduce their greenhouse gas footprint by paying an industrial carbon price”.
He “confirmed diplomatic talks are heading in the right direction but not resolved”, CBC reported.
A longer version of this story was originally published by The Energy Mix as part of its partnership with Small Change Fund.
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What’s on the climate calendar for November 2026?
This is a republication of November’s edition of The Climate Agenda – a subscriber-only newsletter designed to keep you informed of the key events, negotiations and announcements happening every month. If you want to receive The Climate Agenda straight to your inbox at the start of each month, sign up as a subscriber today.
COP31 begins in one week, and we’ll have five specialist reporters on the ground in Antalya, Türkiye, bringing you every development as it happens. From the negotiations to leaders’ speeches and side events, we’ll be there to dissect what it all means for international climate policy on electrification, just transition, adaptation finance and much more.
Here’s what you need to know for November, why it matters and what to expect.
US midterm elections Tuesday 3 November – United StatesThe geopolitical highlight for the first week of November is the US midterm elections, which will show whether American voters are in any mood to forgive President Donald Trump for failing to bring down the cost of living. From an energy perspective, his pro-oil and gas stance hasn’t led to cheaper prices for consumers, pushed up by the US-instigated Iran conflict. And his diesel deal with Russia won’t yet have made a difference at the pump.
The key issue for climate and energy policy is whether the Republicans hold onto their governing trifecta. If so, then expect continued dismantling of regulations that protect the environment, as well as strong backing for fossil fuel production. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, which polls suggest is possible, it could trigger a push to restore Biden-era clean energy tax credits, and support states wanting to restart mothballed wind and solar projects.
Data centres have been a hot-wire issue, with growing community opposition to their expansion – partly due to concerns over rising utility bills as the facilities gobble power. Whether Republicans or Democrats win Congress, both are likely to make tech firms pay for the extra electricity production they need, with the latter favouring renewable sources.
Governor races are also taking place in key states for climate issues, including Democrat-run California, which has used the courts to fight Trump’s attacks on clean energy.
Read more: National climate plans now promise half the emission cuts expected by UN
Read more: The more Europe relies on the US for energy, the more it’s vulnerable to pressure by Trump
Brazilian President Lula da Silva, speaks next to the COP30 President and COP 30 CEO during the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) in Belem, Brazil on November 19, 2025. (Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/COP30) Brazilian President Lula da Silva, speaks next to the COP30 President and COP 30 CEO during the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) in Belem, Brazil on November 19, 2025. (Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/COP30) COP30 Deforestation and Fossil Fuel Transition Roadmaps Tuesday 3 November – BrazilBrazil is set to unveil two global roadmaps: one for transitioning away from fossil fuels, the other for ending deforestation.
The COP30 presidency promised them in the dying hours of the Belém summit last November as a last-minute fix to break a political impasse. Since then, it has been consulting with countries, experts and campaigners around the world to gather ideas and sketch out the elements to include in these blueprints.
Don’t expect the roadmaps to offer any new global targets or give direct instructions on what countries must do, either to cut fossil fuel production and consumption or better protect forests. Rather, Brazil has said the documents will identify barriers and priority actions, highlight existing mechanisms and present a range of options that can be adapted to different national contexts.
It remains unclear what will happen with the reports once they are delivered on Tuesday. At the Bonn talks last June, a group of European and small island nations called for the roadmaps to be brought into the official negotiations, warning that a one-off report won’t cut it. But such efforts would undoubtedly face stiff opposition from fossil fuel-producing nations that objected to drafting the energy transition roadmap within the formal UN process last year.
Read more: European, island states seek clear future for global roadmap to cut fossil fuels
Read more: COP30 roadmap to end deforestation will invite countries to draft domestic plans
Read more: What we need to see in the roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels
Leaders will visit a Green Climate Fund-backed coastal resilience project in Tuvalu during the Pre-COP31 meeting in the Pacific. (Photo courtesy of the Australia-Pacific Partnership for COP31) Leaders will visit a Green Climate Fund-backed coastal resilience project in Tuvalu during the Pre-COP31 meeting in the Pacific. (Photo courtesy of the Australia-Pacific Partnership for COP31) UNEP Adaptation Gap Report Wednesday 4 November – Nairobi, KenyaThe UN Environment Programme (UNEP) will publish its annual assessment of how well the world is planning, implementing and – crucially – financing measures to cope with worsening climate impacts.
Past editions have made for grim reading. Last year’s report warned of a widening gap between what developing countries need for adaptation and what they can access. It estimated they will need $310–365 billion a year by 2035, which is 12 to 14 times current international flows. The report also found that a goal of doubling international public adaptation finance by 2025 was likely to have been missed.
This year’s edition will be closely watched with adaptation expected to be a big-ticket item at COP31. Governments are likely to discuss the specifics of a commitment to triple adaptation finance for developing nations by 2035, agreed at COP30 last year – particularly what the baseline for that pledge is. Negotiators will be debating how to track progress against the 59 indicators of the Global Goal on Adaptation.
Read more: Editor’s Desk: Nepal’s disaster has laid bare the world’s adaptation accountability gap
Read more: Bonn climate talks end in “gridlock” on adaptation and emissions-cutting
Read more: New data shows rich nations likely missed 2025 goal to double adaptation finance
Photo: IRENA@COP31 Photo: IRENA@COP31 COP31 Climate Conference Monday 9 November – Friday 20 November – Antalya, TürkiyeThe climate community’s attention turns this month to Antalya for the annual UN climate summit. From the outset, COP31 will have an unprecedented, and potentially explosive, set-up: Türkiye is COP president overseeing the non-negotiated Action Agenda, while Australia runs the negotiations.
Billed, once again, as an “implementation COP”, the talks come amid a global energy crisis largely sparked by the actions of the US government, which is not expected to show up on the Turkish Riviera. It is also the first COP in the era of climate overshoot, coming just weeks after the UN officially confirmed the 1.5C warming limit will be breached and set out a narrow pathway to bring temperatures back down to the most ambitious Paris goal.
Unlike most recent COPs, the formal negotiations lack a clear headline item. Countries are due to establish and define the scope of the Just Transition Mechanism agreed in Belém last year, including its rules, governance and possible funding arrangements. On adaptation, vulnerable countries want a clearer path to delivering last year’s pledge to triple finance by 2035 and to putting the new progress indicators to work on the ground.
Governments are also likely to clash over next steps on the transition away from fossil fuels, and especially over whether the mitigation work programme – the forum dedicated to emission-cutting measures – has any future beyond this year.
Notable events to look out for in Antalya:
Opening session (9 November): The summit kicks off with the customary first-morning plenary. After the usual pageantry from the host nation, negotiating blocs and individual countries will deliver statements setting out their stall for the next two weeks. Watch out for a potential fight over the summit’s agenda – perhaps on issues relating to finance and trade following submissions requesting additional items – also a COP tradition.
Electrification (10 November): On Energy Day, the Turkish presidency is expected to formally launch its flagship electrification pledge, revealing which countries have signed up. Signatories will voluntarily commit to raising electricity’s share of global final energy consumption to 35% by 2035, though the current text does not require that power to come from clean sources. There is also a question mark over whether and how this can be included in the political cover decision the COP co-hosts have said they will aim to produce.
Leaders Summit (11-12 November): Heads of state and governments will jet into town for the traditional high-level segment in the middle of the first week, where world leaders typically talk up their climate record, air their grievances and call for more action.
Relatively few powerful leaders are on the list this time. Brazil’s Lula is set for another star turn this year, fresh from his surprise election win in October. The UK’s Andy Burnham, Spain’s Pedro Sanchez and China’s vice-premier Ding Xuexiang are expected, alongside Türkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Australia’s Anthony Albanese. In addition, African and small island nations will feature prominently.
Our COP31 Briefing newsletter will offer a more in-depth preview of the talks later this week.
Read more: Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31
Read more: COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment
Read more: From Belém to Antalya – gains, gaps and challenges for a new Just Transition Mechanism
International Maritime Organization (IMO) Shipping Talks Monday 23 November – Friday 4 December – London, United KingdomOne year on from explosive talks in which Trump’s officials teamed up with Saudi Arabia to delay a deal to make the shipping industry greener, governments will gather on the banks of the Thames for another attempt to reach agreement.
The Net Zero Framework, provisionally agreed in October 2025, includes a series of emissions reduction targets for the owners of large ships along with penalties for not meeting them, rewards for doing so and measures to make the maritime transition fair.
The framework is likely to be either tweaked or radically rewritten so that it’s more acceptable to the US and Saudis. Brazil and Japan have submitted compromise proposals. Analysts find those will move shipping further away from being able to meet its climate goals.
There will be closed-door talks between November 23-27 and a second week of talks open to accredited media from November 30 to December 4. Agreement on a proposal, perhaps decided through a vote, is expected after long and technical negotiations. The shipping industry’s 3% share of the world’s emissions is at stake.
Read more: London talks raise hopes for green shipping deal
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When ‘After’ Means Alive
At first glance, it looks almost like an embrace.
One coral fragment is pale, its branching form pressed against a smaller, richly colored counterpart. Nine weeks later, the pale fragment has regained its color. Seen against the black background, the transformation is unmistakable. Something living has made contact with something struggling, and the struggle has changed course.
I keep returning to the place where they meet.
There is a scientific explanation for what happens there. There is also an emotional response that arrives before the explanation, before the species’ name, before any understanding of the experiment. We recognize vulnerability. We recognize proximity. We see what looks like help.
Giving Recovery a ShapeThe research behind this remarkable coral moment, led by Stanford doctoral student Danny Collins and captured in a series of photographs, concerns a particular kind of recovery. Bleached coral fragments placed in contact with healthy, genetically identical fragments fused tissues, allowing beneficial algae to move into the depleted coral. Recovery followed within weeks.
Photos © Danny Collins. Used with permission.“We thought that some transfer could take place, but we never would have expected it to be so fast, clear, and beautiful,” Collins wrote in an email.
The paired photographs released with the study give that discovery a shape, a before and after. We can locate it, follow it, see where it begins. The point of contact becomes the center of the story.
For someone unfamiliar with coral biology, it also offers a way into science. Collins, whose background includes visual and media studies alongside marine science, was thinking about that invitation from the start.
Collins holding coral fragments. © Dan Griffin GG Films, used with permission“I had a broad audience of all ages and backgrounds in my mind throughout this entire study,” he said. “I wanted everyone to be able to understand our study in just one image and have them say, ‘Wow, I get it.’”
The close view brings the coral into an intimate scale. Its textured surface becomes visible. The contrast between the fragments gives the eye somewhere to begin. The second photograph rewards the attention paid to the first.
When the Sequence ChangesFor those accustomed to environmental before-and-after photographs, this sequence can feel almost disorienting. We know the usual direction. The forest becomes a clearing. The glacier retreats. The reef loses its color. “Before” holds abundance; “after” records what has been taken away.
Here, “after” means recovery.
The reversal does not diminish the importance of documenting destruction. Such photographs provide evidence, preserve memory, and make damage harder to deny. I would never want conservation to surrender that work. But I worry about what happens when loss becomes the only future our images teach us to anticipate.
If every sequence ends with less life, where do we learn to picture the work of repair?
An image of recovery makes room for a different question. Instead of stopping at what happened to the coral, we begin to wonder what helped it. Attention moves toward a process, toward the conditions that made a different outcome possible. There is still damage in the frame, but there is also something to investigate.
The Beauty Survives ExplanationAnd then there is the metaphor, which is difficult to resist.
Healthy coral comes to the rescue. It melds with its bleached counterpart. Life appears to pass across a boundary. Anyone who has ever needed another person during illness, grief, or exhaustion may find something familiar in that arrangement. The photographs seem to offer a small, wordless account of being helped.
The fragments are genetically identical, and their fusion is no evidence of compassion. The embrace is something I see.
The healthy coral extends its polyps underwater. © Danny Collins, used with permissionBut Collins also finds meaning beyond the mechanism. “I find this represents the power and importance of contact, an idea that can be extended well beyond corals,” he said.
The apparent gesture has physical substance: Tissue connects, and beneficial algae move through it. The beauty survives explanation.
What One Coral Can PromiseA powerful photograph travels easily — and these generated headlines around the world. The qualifications attached to a scientific paper travel less reliably. These two panels offer a satisfying ending that the research itself cannot yet promise.
“I want people to recognize that these experiments were just done in the lab and we have not solved coral bleaching, the ocean is still getting warmer, but that this research opens a door to new possibilities for recovering corals that have already bleached,” Collins said.
Supplying a healthy genetic match for every bleached coral is not feasible at the scale that reefs require. The finding opens a research direction; making it useful in the ocean remains work ahead.
This coral does not owe us reassurance about the whole ocean. Its recovery is worth understanding without asking it to settle the fate of reefs.
Between Damaged and LostThe photographs also ask us to reconsider the boundary between damaged and lost. To an unfamiliar eye, the pale fragment may already look finished. Its recovery exposes the risk in that assumption. A living thing can be in profound trouble while still retaining capacities we have not learned how to support.
What can still be done, by whom, under what conditions, and with what prospect of success? Those questions remain worth asking after the dramatic injury, when the headlines have moved on.
There is human labor beyond the edges of the photographs, too. Someone maintained the experiment, observed the changes, made the images, examined the evidence, and worked with colleagues to understand it. The apparent simplicity of the two panels compresses a process that requires time, skill, and resources.
Tissues bridge between the two coral fragments. © Danny Collins, used with permissionA useful public response would follow that work outward. Who supports it? What would the next experiment need? How can people help sustain the institutions, environmental protections, and communities on which conservation depends? The photograph opens those questions; communication needs to carry them further.
Otherwise, even the most moving image risks becoming another brief encounter in an endless scroll.
An “After” Worth Working TowardThere is something else missing from these photographs: a picture of the coral before it bleached.
The sequence begins with injury already present. We never see an original, undamaged condition against which to measure everything that follows. We enter the story at a moment when something has gone wrong, and the question is what happens next.
That feels familiar. Much of conservation begins in places already altered, with populations already diminished and relationships already disrupted. People arrive with concern, skills, and resources long after the opportunity to prevent all harm has passed. They must decide what remains possible from here.
Collins’ own description of the research begins in that uncertain territory. “This all started from a simple experiment that has blossomed into a fascinating deep dive with surprises at every corner,” he told me.
The finished photograph can conceal that uncertainty. Placing two moments beside each other makes the passage between them look almost inevitable. But the researchers did not begin with the second image in hand. They had to ask a question whose answer they could not yet see.
Anyone considering whether to support conservation faces some version of that problem. The outcome is unavailable when commitment is needed. A restored habitat cannot be photographed in advance. The work asks people to invest attention, money, and effort in a future that remains contingent.
Here, at least, we can see that an intervention was followed by recovery. That does not tell us how the next experiment will end. It gives the next question a basis.
It also makes me think about what we demand of restoration. An imagined return to an untouched world can be a powerful aspiration, but it can leave every achievable improvement looking inadequate. Historical conditions matter: they help us understand what has been lost and resist accepting impoverishment as normal. Yet the distance from those conditions cannot be the only measure of whether work is worth doing.
A damaged place may have a future worth protecting even when its past cannot be fully recovered. Deciding what that future could support requires evidence, local knowledge, and difficult choices about priorities. There is no photograph that can make those choices for us.
But this one offers a useful starting position. The injury has already happened. Something remains alive. Someone decides it is worth finding out what might help.
The second panel exists because that question was pursued.
A Reason to StayAs an ocean conservationist, I want images like this to do more than provide a moment of relief. I want them to make people curious enough to stay, to learn the limits, to discover where their own abilities might be useful. Feeling something can be the beginning of participation if we make the next step visible and possible.
I return to the two panels and find the injury still there in the first. Nothing has been erased from the record. The second panel simply prevents the first from having the final word.
Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:Ghost Reefs of 2083: The Paleontology of Color (A Speculative ‘Fiction’)
The post When ‘After’ Means Alive appeared first on The Revelator.
How the biggest renewable energy project in US history finally got built
When the sun goes down, the wind picks up in central New Mexico, whipping through arid canyons with a ghostly howl that for centuries, locals have likened to the wails of the folkloric ghost La Llorona.
A few hours east of Albuquerque, this June, those gusts began powering the largest wind farm this continent has ever seen, twirling over 900 colossal steel turbines. Each is as tall as the Statue of Liberty, scattered across a patch of desert roughly the size of Chicago. They plug into a 550-mile transmission line stitched across the Southwest and are now powering over 1 million homes — as far away as California.
The SunZia Wind and Transmission project is a rare 21st-century triumph of American infrastructure, an engineering marvel that generates more electricity than the Hoover Dam. When the turbines came online this spring, they immediately broke records for wind-generated power in California’s energy supply, where solar power may rule the day, but the winds of New Mexico increasingly fuel the night.
After years of stagnant power growth, the U.S. is absolutely starving for more electricity, with demand projected to rise by 25 percent by the end of this decade, and a staggering 78 percent by 2050. Enormous as this challenge might seem, it may ultimately be the catalyst the country needs to dramatically dial up its renewable energy infrastructure, so that the years to come are powered not by gas or coal, but by clean energy sources like the sun and the wind. By next summer, the project will have prevented about 9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, according to Pattern Energy, the project’s developer.
For decades, however, it seemed the project would remain little more than a spectral dream.
“It works!” This was the call Hunter Armistead, Pattern’s CEO, remembers getting from his head engineer when the turbines came online for the very first time. “We were creating power, and it was showing up 550 miles away in Phoenix, almost as if it was magic.” During the ribbon-cutting for the wind farm, some construction workers showed off massive new turbine tattoos. “It’s their pride that for the rest of their lives, they can drive by and tell their kid, ‘I did this,’” Armistead said.
Read Next A gigantic green energy transmission project will cut through Indigenous lands in the Southwest Taylar Dawn StagnerBut SunZia almost didn’t get built at all. It is not just the project’s scale that makes it remarkable, but the utter morass its developers slogged through to bring it online. The project spanned five presidential administrations, an ownership change, a major reroute, and a standoff with a U.S. military base.
It also involved a series of lawsuits from local tribal communities and environmental advocates, some of which remain pending even as the turbines now finally whirl. Building any renewable megaproject requires vast amounts of space, and hyper-specific natural conditions, like a wind that blows at night or a reliably sun-soaked desert plain. Then getting that energy to major cities means traversing some of the most pristine, spectacular natural corridors this nation has left, and particularly in the Southwest, rubbing up against the sacred lands of local tribal communities.
The decades-long saga to settle some of these tensions has turned SunZia into a helpful lesson, and for many, deserved or not, it became the ultimate poster child for permitting reform. And for many years, the country’s need for power didn’t seem to call for such a wildly ambitious project anyway. But in the interim, as the world changed, SunZia changed too, becoming — at least in some places — a better and more collaborative project than it was when it began. And now, with a nation finally focused on building more clean energy megaprojects, it can offer a glimpse of what’s to come, even a blueprint of what could be.
The real reason(s) it took so long for SunZia to get builtWhen SunZia was first proposed in 2006, the same year Twitter went online, coal was still the most important electricity source in America, and the nation’s appetite for electricity had remained nearly flat year after year.
And for the next 17 years, SunZia flailed, never even breaking ground. It ping-ponged between financial and regulatory purgatories that most commentators have attributed to endless permitting delays. There were, for example, a few state-level permitting debacles, with New Mexico rejecting SunZia’s initial transmission route in 2018. Even after such interstate power lines get federal approval, they often need to wait years longer for approvals from every state in which their project passes.
Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, for one, has cited SunZia as a key impetus for his co-sponsoring the Senate’s new plan for permitting reform. This would make it easier for the federal government to coordinate approval processes for interstate transmission lines, ensuring that they happen concurrently and preventing one state from dragging its heels.
The project had faced one particularly large and sticky permitting challenge: getting the power through the White Sands Missile Range. But this, and other challenges, were eventually resolved relatively quickly. And to David Hayes, who served as deputy secretary of the Department of the Interior during the Obama administration, this suggests that financing hamstrung the project even more than red tape.
Read Next The bipartisan energy bill tearing the climate movement apart Jake Bittle & Austin Corona“The facts are the facts, and they got their permit,” said Hayes — all the way back in 2015, not long after the Obama administration put SunZia on a “fast track” to approval. “So we finally got the permit done. Hooray, right? And then nothing happens. Nothing happens.”
Part of that was the fact that the two states where SunZia wanted to build its transmission lines were not entirely on board. But it was also the sheer expense involved in building the project, especially given that the federal approval required burying parts of the transmission line near the missile range. Moreover, even if everything went perfectly with the project’s permitting process, it might have been impossible to build SunZia back then, said Armistead, because “we really didn’t have the market need for it.”
The U.S. simply wasn’t as ravenous for new electricity as it is right now, and the importance of building out the future of energy was not enticing enough for investors on its own.
But, refusing to die a slow death of a thousand permitting blockades or financial setbacks, SunZia instead evolved. Pattern Energy, initially only in charge of developing the wind farm portion of the project, took over the transmission line project in 2022. Around that time, SunZia applied for a revised federal permit, one that would circumvent the missile range, and within less than two years — a relative sprint for federal bureaucracy — they had a new approval in hand. Then came $11 billion in financing from several global financial institutions, pension funds, and clean energy investors. Then, a few years of construction time later, the Americas’ biggest wind farm was finally switched on.
And more massive projects like this will be needed, because nowadays “there is no longer the excuse” of a market unready for high volumes of clean energy, Armistead told me. “It is game time, and we’re supposed to get this done.”
What America’s biggest clean energy project got rightOne of the secrets to SunZia’s ultimate success in New Mexico was the project’s ability to strike compromises, even with some of its earliest critics. In some cases, a bunch of birds.
Right about now, the earliest migratory birds, like the crimson-capped sandhill crane, have begun arriving at their Southwestern wintering grounds, not far from some of SunZia’s newly operational high-voltage transmission lines.
This crane had nearly gone extinct before, driven in part by an explosion of new hydroelectric dams in the early 20th century, whose construction dried out local wetlands. SunZia’s initial route, which was planned across one of the most congested flyways in the country, threatened them again, birders feared, alongside other migratory species who might accidentally fly into the new power lines, a threat believed to kill millions of birds nationwide each year.
Read Next Congress has a plan to stop Trump’s attack on offshore wind. It may not be enough. Jake BittleWhile SunZia’s original developer, the Southwestern Power Group, was largely unmoved by those concerns, said Sarah Rose, vice president of climate at the National Audubon Society, the nonprofit found an unusually receptive partner to compromise when Pattern Energy took over.
“They took their role as a project developer really seriously,” she said, “and I think they engaged with us with a lot of integrity and a lot of good faith.” Under a rerouting plan, original power lines were moved north, erected next to existing infrastructure, or affixed with visual warning systems or bird diverters. Not only did the changes make the bird advocates happy, but they were enough to help convince the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission, which had rejected SunZia’s permit application a few years earlier in part due to these concerns, to unanimously approve the project in 2022.
To be clear, not everybody believed Pattern always made the appropriate compromises, especially in Arizona, where SunZia’s route remained unchanged under the new management. Peter Else, a local environmentalist, has spent years fighting SunZia in court over its intrusion into the scenic San Pedro Valley, a region that is sacred to Indigenous communities such as the Tohono O’odham Nation and San Carlos Apache Tribe. To see it marred by more power lines through the landscape has been like “mourning a death,” Else said, “like an ecological homicide.”
He would have liked to see SunZia try to run the valley’s new power lines alongside existing ones, as it managed to do in parts of New Mexico, a process that Armistead told me would not have been possible because the Arizona portion of the line “was already put to bed,” and the original federal permit had found the valley to be “the least impactful and best route.” A lawsuit from the Tohono O’odham Nation and San Carlos Apache Tribe accusing SunZia and the Department of the Interior of failing to protect the valley remains pending.
Of course, climate change threatens many of these regions more than a single power line. In the two decades it took SunZia to begin pumping clean energy across state lines, waves of extreme heat have taken tens of thousands of American lives, and the entire Southwest has continued in a mega drought unseen in the past 1,200 years.
These are some of the very concerns that SunZia seeks, in part, to combat. And if we want to avoid even more heat deaths, extreme droughts, more flash floods, and more habitat destruction, then we probably will need a lot more facilities like it, some of which will require hard tradeoffs.
But they aren’t doomed always to. It may have taken SunZia over a decade to learn that lesson, but for future megaprojects, the blueprint may already be there. The nearby 280-mile high-voltage Southline Transmission Project spanning parts of Arizona and New Mexico is set to begin construction next year, and it’s been so intentional about minimizing its ecological and cultural impact that even Else praised it as a good idea. And this approach could pave the way for even more essential large-scale projects like it. “If more folks could come to the table looking for solutions as opposed to expecting conflict,” Rose said, “I think we would be able to move a lot more quickly.” Ideally, it won’t take another 20 years.
This story was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the biggest renewable energy project in US history finally got built on Nov 1, 2026.
The EPA is quietly killing its web archive
In a little-noticed webpage update, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a plan to decommission its online web archive at the end of the year, a move that would wipe tens of thousands of publicly available environmental resources from the web. The discreet banner notice comes in stark contrast to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s recent public takedowns of the agency’s power plant pollution standards and federal methane regulatory system.
“The EPA’s online archive makes information about a wide variety of environmental issues and past policies available to the public, dating back at least 20 years,” said Gretchen Gehrke, co-founder of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, or EDGI. “This information is irreplaceable, and if the archive is decommissioned, that information will be lost forever.”
For decades, the web archive has been an unparalleled resource for researchers, legislators, policymakers, and the public writ large. It houses everything from fact sheets and environmental reports to agency policy changes and regulatory actions, making it a tool for “democratic oversight,” according to Gehrke, who for 10 years has been tracking changes to vulnerable federal environmental data.
Screenshot of the EPA’s online archive webpage Rachel SantarsieroThis isn’t the first time the environmental agency has tried to shutter the online web archive. In late January 2022, the Biden administration’s EPA announced plans to discontinue the online repository, citing burdensome financial upkeep; through a Freedom of Information Act request, Gehrke was able to determine that the agency spent roughly $2 million a year to maintain it. A coalition of environmentalists, historians, and librarians swiftly condemned the decision, with groups like EDGI and American Society for Environmental History calling the announcement “alarming” and cause for a “tremendous gap” in the historical record.
After five months of public backlash, the EPA acquiesced, in part by announcing it would delay the web archive’s retirement by one year to July 2023. I reported on it at the time for New Security Beat:
“News of this welcome reprieve for the EPA digital archive raises a significant question: Why continue with plans to shut it down at all? Postponement does not resolve the eventual damage to government transparency and historical record keeping that the archive’s demise will create. And the concern of organizations opposed to closure will not be satisfied by an additional year of operation.”
In March 2023, the agency walked back its decision further still by adjusting the banner announcement to say that the online web archive was simply “retiring” — end date not included. Since then, over the last three and a half years, the online resource has soldiered on quietly, no longer being updated but still accessible to the public until a few weeks ago, when the EPA updated the archive’s expiration date to December 31, 2026.
While the usability of the archive has historically been far from perfect — researchers often encountered dead links and frustratingly limited search capabilities — the archive has held a trove of tens of thousands of EPA documents dating back to the 1990s simply not available elsewhere.
Major political environmental inflection points could be tracked through the archive, such as President George W. Bush’s 2003 Clear Skies Initiative, or President Barack Obama’s 2015 Clean Power Plan — two initiatives that sought to dramatically transform power plant pollution standards. And during President Trump’s first term, when the administration deleted the majority of the EPA’s climate change web resources, the online resource crucially maintained and made accessible these defunct pages for the public.
Read Next The EPA’s data on cancer risk from air pollution has gone dark Sachi Kitajima MulkeyThe archival repository has also been a tool for environmental enforcement and oversight. In 1989, after an investigation found that military operations had contaminated the soil, sediment, surface water, and groundwater at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune and the Marine Corps Air Station in North Carolina, the EPA listed the base on its National Priorities List. Documents on the EPA’s decades-long investigation were preserved on the archive and helped nearby residents and service members on base overcome doubts about the agency’s effectiveness and better evaluate chemical exposures. Earlier this week, President Trump said he would withhold compensation due to service members and their families exposed at Camp Lejeune if Republicans lose their majority in Congress.
Now, the EPA’s latest move could further undermine public confidence at a time when trust in government is near historic lows.
“The EPA’s insistence on decommissioning its web archive will only continue to erode public trust — at the exact time the public and lawmakers need agency information the most,” Lauren Harper, the first Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, wrote in an email. “Killing easy access to records forces researchers and lawmakers to flood an already underwater FOIA office just to see once-public records.”
The recently updated webpage states that historical information can still be found in the EPA’s “snapshot collections,” but given the second Trump administration’s crusade against public data and evisceration of funds to federal programs and personnel, it’s hard to know for sure if all, or even a fraction, of the archive’s contents will live on.
“EPA should expand and systematize the archive, not throw it away and expect that three discrete snapshots will suffice,” said Gehrke.
The EPA did not respond to a request for comment.
toolTips('.classtoolTips7','A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over a 20-year period, it is roughly 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.');This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The EPA is quietly killing its web archive on Oct 31, 2026.
COP17 delivers fragile deal to boost conservation and funding for nature
Governments at the COP17 nature summit in Armenia agreed on Saturday to scale up their policies to protect the planet’s shrinking biodiversity, and for the first time invited large emerging economies like China and Gulf states to take on donor responsibilities to help fund those efforts.
For the past two weeks, countries held talks in Yerevan under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to outline a plan to ramp up currently “insufficient” policies to conserve land and marine ecosystems. A recent UN progress report found the world is off track to meet 22 out of 23 global targets aimed at reversing species loss and protecting 30% of land and seas by 2030.
While a response plan, called the “Global Review of Collective Progress”, was expected to be the main outcome of COP17, negotiations struggled to advance amid a deadlock over the controversial subject of how to finance the boost in conservation measures needed.
After an all-night session on Friday, delegates agreed to invite developing countries to voluntarily signal their interest in assuming donor funding obligations alongside developed nations. Negotiators repeatedly warned that any stronger provisions on expanding the donor base would collapse the deal.
COP president: Results beat expectationsAn exhausted COP17 president Hambardzum Matevosyan, Armenia’s environment minister, told journalists in the early hours of Saturday that “we’ve achieved more than we could’ve expected” given the “importance” of the decisions being taken.
“It was 100% possible that those items did not made it through. 100% possible,” he said, adding that the conference had made progress on “all the most important items”.
Speaking at the closing plenary, the group of Pacific Islands said that, while the summit had achieved “great outcomes”, delegates are also departing Yerevan “with realities not reflected in the official text”, such as the low replenishment of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a key funder of nature projects.
Some observers also said the deal did not go far enough. Steven Guilbeault, a former Canadian environment minister who helped broker the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), said the Yerevan package of action is “an important step forward”, but still “falls short of what is needed to meet our 2030 commitments”.
An Lambrechts, biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International, said COP17 had kept things moving forward and set well-intentioned promises, but added that these “won’t remove major roadblocks to implementation” such as insufficient finance and debt constraints in developing countries.
WWF chief conservation officer Daudi Sumba noted that financial issues were not fully resolved. Despite the deal in Yerevan, “I fear finance will remain the key issue that continues to haunt the UN biodiversity summits,” he said in a statement.
‘Yerevan Pathway’ tackles nature plans and subsidiesIn the lead-up to the summit, the UN assessment report showed countries are falling short on virtually all targets in the GBF, the 2022 global deal often referred to as the ‘Paris Agreement for nature’.
They include a landmark target to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and sea by 2030. If countries all stick to their current national goals, about 26% of land would be protected and only about 12% of marine ecosystems would be under conservation measures by the end of this decade.
The main COP17 decision – named the Yerevan Pathway by the presidency – calls for countries to revise their biodiversity plans, subject to available funding, with a particular focus on addressing the gap in coverage of “marine, coastal and inland water ecosystems”.
It also urges the over 60 countries that have not yet submitted a national plan to finalise one “as soon as possible”, while taking into account the gaps identified by the UN progress report.
Countries also agreed to tackle the drivers of biodiversity loss by “accelerating” the reduction of subsidies for activities that damage nature. Subsidy reform, covered by Target 18 of the GBF, is where countries have made the least progress so far, according to the assessment report.
Jill Hepp, director of nature and marine policy and incentives at green group Conservation International, said singling out subsidies in the Yerevan Pathway “gives a strong signal” that closing the gap for biodiversity action requires “more urgent efforts to reform harmful incentives and scale up positive incentives”.
Delegates huddle for a last-minute negotiation at the COP17 closing plenary in Yerevan, Armenia, on October 31, 2026. (Photo: IISD/ENB – Mike Muzurakis) Delegates huddle for a last-minute negotiation at the COP17 closing plenary in Yerevan, Armenia, on October 31, 2026. (Photo: IISD/ENB – Mike Muzurakis) “Timid” steps to expand base of donorsHaving failed to meet a target to channel $20 billion for biodiversity conservation by 2025 and faced with shrinking aid budgets, the EU pushed a proposal to expand the list of which countries count as donors, so that wealthy emerging economies like China and Saudi Arabia could also voluntarily contribute. The group of Arab nations strongly opposed this.
During the talks, Irish minister of state for nature, Christopher O’Sullivan, whose country holds the EU presidency, said the bloc wanted the world’s “new realities” to be reflected in the donor list.
Negotiations remained gridlocked for most of the two-week talks, until a last-day compromise was struck to invite developing countries that may want donor status “to indicate to the [Convention on Biological Diversity] secretariat their interest in being included in the corresponding list”.
Countries also asked the secretariat to send an invitation to emerging economies wanting donor status at each subsequent COP, and requested a technical report on “the implications of inclusion in the list” for emerging economies.
Swiss lead negotiator Gabriela Blatter said her country had expected greater steps towards expanding the base of contributing countries, but added that “if we’re mutually unhappy, it’s probably the closest we can get on these very delicate political compromises”. Saudi Arabia expressed dissatisfaction, saying it had expected “a lot less”.
The fragile deal was approved in a package of decisions together with the Global Review, after some delegations including Brazil and China appealed to the plenary not to make further changes to the text at the risk of collapsing the whole agreement.
In a statement delivered to the closing plenary, the EU said the finance outcome had delivered “timid” progress towards fully broadening the base of donors.
An EU negotiator speaks at the COP17 closing plenary in Yerevan, Armenia on October 31, 2026. (Photo: UN Biodiversity) An EU negotiator speaks at the COP17 closing plenary in Yerevan, Armenia on October 31, 2026. (Photo: UN Biodiversity) Cali Fund still not operationalAdopted two years ago at COP16, the Cali Fund was seen by some observers as a way to channel private-sector finance into biodiversity conservation, as governments struggle to find public funds. But it is still struggling to get up on its feet.
The fund allows big corporations to access certificates for the use of genetic material found in biodiversity in return for a financial contribution, which experts estimate has the potential to raise up to $6.9bn for biodiversity. While voluntary, companies are encouraged to pay 1% of their profits or 0.1% of revenue into the fund.
But since its creation, the fund has received little more than $10,000, which Guilbeault argued is because the rules for disbursements to local communities and the operation of the fund had yet to be fleshed out. This was due to happen at COP17.
Yet, while the final decision on the fund laid out some of the rules – including how companies can earn “Cali Fund certificates” – some key technical details were left to the next COP in 2028 in Ecuador. This includes the issue of whether companies can pay a lower rate if they use genetic data for only a small portion of their products.
“By punting essential decisions to two years from now, parties have all but ensured the fund remains empty until then,” said Pakhi Das, a public policy advisor at NGO Plant-for-the-Planet.
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Trump cut funding for farmers — then unlocked billions for them before Election Day
The last two years have been a rough going for farmers and ranchers in the U.S. Rollbacks to several Department of Agriculture programs have cut available funding and left producers in the dark. Last year, farm groups sued the federal agency after it deleted multiple webpages that mentioned climate change, including some with critical information for planning around extreme weather. (Early this year, the ag department agreed to restore the webpages in a settlement.) Just this month, the USDA cut solar from a popular renewable energy grant program and dealt another setback to farmers who wish to lower their utility bills and pad their incomes by installing solar panels on their land.
Meanwhile, cattle ranchers in the U.S. have been frustrated by high beef prices. The average price of ground beef has been steadily climbing since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching new records in the last two years. Persistent droughts contributing to historically low herd sizes have also added to ranchers’ plight. And President Donald Trump’s various moves to supposedly help lower the price of beef — such as importing more beef from abroad — haven’t helped. Ranchers even say these trade deals undercut their business model.
So heading into the midterm elections, many agricultural producers, once a critical part of Trump’s base, have been clear that they’re aggravated by and disagree with the president. In an apparent attempt to appease these constituents, the USDA has very recently unlocked billions of dollars in support for farmers, as well as additional money for ranchers.
Whether it’s enough to smooth over the tension that farmers and ranchers are feeling remains to be seen. The president of the Iowa Farmers Union, Aaron Lehman, said that U.S. farmers “have needed help for months” and “never should have been put in this position.”
The new funding also underlines the administration’s commitment to supporting fossil fuels, even as the use of these energy sources emit greenhouse gases that further warm the planet. On October 19, the president announced $8 billion would be made available to help farmers make up money they lost due to high diesel prices.
Read Next Hurricane Helene haunts the midterms in North Carolina Katie MyersThe process through which farmers apply for and receive said funding is still unclear. In a press release, the ag department stated it would provide “simple, proportional support to producers” for part of the losses they incurred during the 2026 crop year. Responding to a request for more details from Grist, a USDA representative said, “President Trump has been the most pro-farmer president in our nation’s history, and the Harvest Fuel Relief Program is the latest action to deliver for them. As USDA works to implement the program, we are actively reviewing all available data to determine payments which are expected to be finalized and processed soon.”
Farmers and ranchers are both incredibly reliant on diesel as a fuel source. Much of the equipment that they use — like tractors, combines, and trucks for moving crops or livestock from one place to another — run on diesel. But diesel prices have been increasing due to the Iran war, which has led to significant supply chain disruptions. A Democrat-led congressional report found that U.S. farmers are on track to spend an additional $2.4 billion on diesel specifically due to Trump’s war in Iran.
The timing of Trump’s $8 billion bailout program for farmers who lost money due to high diesel prices is also ironic, given that the ag department just made it harder for farmers to switch to more efficient energy sources like solar and wind.
Mike Lavender, the policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, called these farmer payments “a failing solution” in a statement. The reality is, he said, that “countless farms nationwide remain in crisis: Farm bankruptcies hit a six-year high this spring, and farmers are carrying heavier debt loads and are more pessimistic about their future.”
On October 26, just over a week before Election Day, the USDA also announced $57 million in funding specifically for ranchers. The funding will help independent producers expand their meat-processing capacity, according to the department’s press release.
Additional measures to help agricultural producers boost their bottom line include an announcement yesterday that the USDA will purchase nearly $500 million in agricultural commodities from U.S. producers.
These bailout programs are also coming at a time when the nation’s foremost agricultural policy remains in limbo. The last farm bill, a legislative package that once upon a time was renewed every five years and controls everything from crop insurance to conservation programs, was passed in 2018. Currently, competing versions of a new farm bill sit in the House of Representatives and the Senate, but advocates say much of the future of the bill hinges on the upcoming midterm elections. For farmers, this period of time represents how the Trump administration is trying to appeal to their needs without a guiding vision for the future.
toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.');This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump cut funding for farmers — then unlocked billions for them before Election Day on Oct 31, 2026.
The Hidden Climate Danger of Authoritarian Neighbors
By Natasha Lindstaedt, University of Essex
Authoritarian regimes have a history of keeping information about escalating disasters secret, even when it could harm their own citizens.
With more weather-related disasters caused by climate change predicted, the issue of whether governments are willing to act faster to share information with neighboring nations is an increasing concern.
The signs are not positive. After the recent massive floods on the Nepal-Tibet border, Chinese state media tightly controlled reporting with a focus on rescue attempts, rather than devastation. It also heavily censored unofficial accounts.
Handheld and security camera footage that showed the destruction at the border appears to have vanished from Chinese media platforms.
On this occasion and in the past, Nepal has accused China of not sharing information quickly about escalating dangers. But Beijing denied there was any disinformation, and said information was released in a “timely” way in this recent incident.
A new report says the Himalayas are approaching a tipping point in terms of the speed and risks of glacier melting and lack of monitoring – with millions of lives and livelihoods at risk. So this issue could not be more urgent.
The recent behavior of another world power, Russia, cast doubt on its willingness to be transparent during a disaster. When floods caused Siberia’s Ishim River to overflow in 2025, local officials hid much of the damage.
The severe consequences of such secrecy is apparent throughout recent history. In 1984, Ethiopian military dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam concealed and downplayed the catastrophic drought which led to a famine, in order to protect the country’s image. A strict media blackout was enforced, as Mengistu’s government refused to share data regarding the scale of the crisis or even acknowledge there was one.
Instead, he prioritized spending over US$100 million (£87 million) on celebrations to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Ethiopia’s Marxist revolution.
Mengistu ignored the ongoing mass starvation crisis in speeches. He also blocked international aid workers and journalists from entering the starving regions. An estimated one million people died due to this lack of action.
Another potential issue is the impact on shared water sources. If autocracies hide prolonged droughts, they may secretly over-extract shared resources, potentially drying out neighboring territories.
Chernobyl’s CoverupHistory shows that lack of warnings about escalating dangers caused by a disaster can have devastating effects in nearby countries.
The nuclear power plant disaster in Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union in 1986 was also covered up. KGB archives revealed that classified information on the extent of the radiation and contamination were kept secret.
Critical information was not released to the Ukrainian people and inhabitants of western Europe until months, and even years, later. Advocacy group Greenpeace estimated that there were potentially between 100,000 and 250,000 additional deaths – mostly due to radiation in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia – because of this lack of transparency.
Myanmar’s quasi-military government has regularly hidden valuable information from journalists, aid workers and other countries after each disaster in that country.
A 7.7-magnitude earthquake that hit central Myanmar in April 2025 killed thousands of people, causing bodies to pile up. Rather than facilitate the support of aid workers, supplies were blocked and confiscated by the military.
Not allowing humanitarian aid to come through in a timely fashion can also accelerate a refugee crisis, as desperate populations may flee in search of help.
Censorship and RepressionAutocracies are more likely to censor and monitor media platforms than democracies. For instance, China recently stopped non-official content being shared about the August 2026 floods.
Some autocracies also restrict access for international aid workers, independent scientists and observers.
There’s another example from 2019. When Zimbabwe was hit by tropical cyclone Idai, its government restricted the involvement of international aid workers, which reduced recovery efforts.
Research has also shown that authoritarian regimes can escalate repression against their own citizens during disasters.
Greater levels of secrecy has implications for disease. Natural disasters frequently lead to infectious disease outbreaks. A government’s refusal to report a climate-driven outbreak could prevent neighbouring states from taking protective measures.
Authoritarian regimes also frequently suppress or delay data regarding extreme weather, glacial melts or industrial accidents to protect the regime’s image. This can compromise the safety, stability and economy of their own citizens and, potentially, neighbouring countries too.
Ecosystems and disasters do not respect political borders. Information censorship and the suppression of data will make us all more vulnerable as climate change-driven incidents escalate.
Natasha Lindstaedt is a professor in the Department of Government at theUniversity of Essex
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The post The Hidden Climate Danger of Authoritarian Neighbors appeared first on The Revelator.
Human-Driven Warming May Have Halted the Onset of a New Ice Age
Researchers have found evidence that warming, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, reversed the advance of a new ice age.
Strange, catastrophic landslides are kicking off across the far north
Nearly a decade ago, a helicopter pilot flying in Canada’s Northwest Territories noticed something peculiar: a landslide so immense, it had blocked a river and created a lake. But that damming power wasn’t what made this slide so strange. What he saw wasn’t just new to the landscape, it was new to science, what researchers have dubbed a “permafrost detachment slide.”
In a recent paper, a team of scientists describes two of these events in the region, one stretching for three-quarters of a mile and the other for 2 miles. Combined, they’d moved 30 million cubic yards of earth. Whereas other kinds of slides send a torrent of rainwater and mud and rock down a hillside, permafrost detachments happen when frozen soils degrade and the land fails catastrophically. Weirder still, the two slides started three decades ago during a wildfire, which slowly transformed the permafrost until the land collapsed in a matter of hours or days along the Johnson River in 2017 and Redstone River in 2018.
When the researchers visited the slides, they found them embedded with chunks of frozen material up to 650 feet long. “It’s a very dramatic manifestation of the changing climate,” said geoscientist Joseph Young, lead author of the paper, who conducted the research while at the University of Alberta. “They’ve only started happening in the last 10, 15 years, and it’s a very drastic and abrupt change in the landscape.”
Permafrost is a major planetary wild card. Simply put, it’s ground that remains frozen for two years or longer, containing ice and dead plants, plus dirt, rock, or sand. Across the Northern Hemisphere, permafrost zones cover an area two and a half times the size of the continental United States. With the Arctic warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, permafrost is now thawing so quickly that it’s gouging massive potholes in the landscape, a phenomenon known as thermokarst, releasing clouds of greenhouse gas in the process.
A similar thing is happening with permafrost detachment slides, only a single event is much, much bigger in scale. “I think it’s fascinating that we’re discovering a new type of thermokarst,” said David Olefeldt, a soil scientist at the University of Alberta, who studies permafrost but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “This is a type of land collapse due to permafrost thaw which hasn’t really been observed before.”
Duane FroeseThe disturbance began in 1995, when a wildfire swept through the region. The flames burned off the vegetation that normally shaded the permafrost, keeping it cool during the sunny northern days of summer. The ground, then, lost a sort of thermal shield. “After about 20 years or so, that thermal signature from the burned forest can reach the base of permafrost,” Young said. “It’s slight, but it’s there.”
The collapse of the permafrost, then, actually came from the bottom up through the mixture of soil, ice, and organic material that comprised it. As the base warmed — even slightly — tension cracks propagated. This created pools of relatively warm water at the surface, which further infiltrated the permafrost. As the melange degraded it slipped downhill at a rate of a handful of feet a year, increasing to perhaps 80 feet annually, before it all suddenly gave way as a detachment slide. “This kind of movement can create its own release of energy because of friction and cracking on the bottom,” said Vladimir E. Romanovsky, a permafrost geophysicist and professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who wasn’t involved in the new research. Glaciers — vast sheets of ice creeping downhill — do this, too, suddenly surging and accelerating.
Because the researchers found those huge blocks of frozen material, they can tell that the permafrost eventually failed from below. That is, if they instead found a bunch of mud in the slide area, that might suggest that the ground degraded from above as the permafrost slowly thawed into mush.
The tumult didn’t stop at the moment of collapse. So much material was displaced that it left walls of permafrost on either side of the slide, which were then exposed to the sun. “Just because you have this large detachment failure, that doesn’t mean it’s over,” Young said. “Actually, it means you’ve opened up more potential for failure.”
Jurjen van der SluijsThe consequences could extend far beyond the Northwest Territories. As permafrost thaws, microbes begin feasting on the organic material within, expelling greenhouse gas as they digest it. This might be kicking off a feedback loop, in which warmer temperatures release more carbon, which leads to more warming and more carbon, and on and on. “That’s a major global concern,” said Miriam Jones, a research geologist who studies permafrost at the United States Geological Survey but wasn’t involved in this research. “It’s a feedback that many of us have been studying.”
At the same time, plants are quickly marching north at miles per decade, a phenomenon known as Arctic greening. In some areas, a rising number of shrubs trap snow, preventing the chill of winter from penetrating the underlying permafrost, thus hastening its decline. More plants also means more fuel for the wildfires that initiate permafrost detachment slides. As if that weren’t bad enough, northern wildfires tend to burn through peat, the carbon-rich material that accumulates in the ground over centuries. These “zombie fires” are so persistent that they can smolder underground even as snow falls above, popping up again during the spring thaw, releasing still more carbon into the atmosphere.
Now the question is: How much more of that planet-warming gas might be spewing from permafrost detachment slides, as bacteria proliferate in the aftermath? “The short answer is: We don’t know how much, because we haven’t characterized and classified it,” Young said. “But it could be quite severe, just because the size of these features.”
Indeed, previous research has found that much smaller instances of abrupt permafrost thaw could be producing significant carbon emissions. “I expect that we can see more of these types of surprises,” Olefeldt said, “as we cross thresholds in other regions that have these vulnerabilities to collapse.”
toolTips('.classtoolTips7','A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over a 20-year period, it is roughly 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.');This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Strange, catastrophic landslides are kicking off across the far north on Oct 30, 2026.
What’s fueling Indonesia’s worst wildfire season in a decade?
A government bus outfitted with oxygen tanks. Fire fighters collapsing to the ground in relief at the first sign of rain. Dozens of orangutans rescued. And hundreds of Indonesian students marching through the haze, some wearing gas masks, others carrying signs that read, “If we burn, you burn with us.”
These are recent scenes from Indonesia’s worst wildfire season in a decade. More than 4.6 million acres have burned across the country since August, blanketing its large island regions, like Kalimantan and Sumatra, in a thick smoke that has spread to neighboring countries. Millions are breathing in this toxic haze, and the government’s data shows that more than 300,000 Indonesians have sought treatment for acute respiratory problems.
On some days, the air quality conditions are more than 13 times worse than the threshold considered unhealthy. And like in many tropical countries, buildings in Indonesia are often built to maximize air flow, rather than filter it or keep it out. “This is a public health catastrophe,” said Robert Field, a fire researcher at Columbia University. Although there are other pressing consequences of the fires, such as carbon emissions and the harm to wildlife and forest habitats, “it’s hard to think much past the air quality issues,” he said.
The fires are the latest environmental crisis inundating Indonesia. The country is not only one of the world’s most populated, but also one of its most disaster-prone. Just last year, 1,200 residents of Sumatra died during catastrophic cyclone-induced flooding and landslides. And the country’s capital city of Jakarta, which already partially sits below sea level, is sinking. As a warming climate pushes sea levels higher, the country is racing to build a new capital on higher ground.
Satellite-detected fires on the island of Borneo, which is home to the five provinces in Indonesia’s Kalimantan region. NASAThese disasters are all wrought from the dangerous combination of human sprawl and climate change. But it’s not yet clear how much hotter temperatures influenced the ongoing disaster. By contrast, wildfires in parts of the world that are warming faster than Indonesia — like the recent devastating outbreaks in Canada and Europe — are clearly attributable to climate change, scientists say.
The primary culprits of Indonesia’s fires, however, are no mystery. A superstrong El Niño has sent Indonesia into a severe drought, drying out the peatlands found across the country. And peat, a kind of soil packed with partially decayed plant matter, is highly flammable, especially so when dried out. But when farmers or agriculture companies light fires to quickly and cheaply clear away vegetation and debris, a common practice in Indonesia, peat fires can quickly get out of control — smoldering underground for months.
“This is a crime against humanity, because what they have done endangers the health of millions of our people,” said Prabowo Subianto, the president of Indonesia, during a Cabinet meeting last week, according to a government press release. Seemingly in an effort to address the public’s outrage, he vowed to investigate who was responsible for lighting the fires and called these actions a kind of environmental terrorism. Frustration over the fires, high living costs, and government spending has sparked numerous large protests across the country in recent weeks.
A helicopter drops water on a peatland fire as a firefighter pulls a hose through the haze in South Sumatra on September 12.Bagus Kurniawan/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The government has also been preparing for the year’s fires for months, ever since scientists first began forecasting this year’s El Niño. “This year, we must be much more careful,” Raja Juli Antoni, Indonesia’s minister of forestry, told the United Nations in May. “The potential for a longer dry season due to El Niño demands heightened vigilance from all of us.”
Unfortunately, the fires were lit anyway. According to Field, who worked with the Indonesian government to create fire prevention strategies in the 2000s, many of the fires appear to be on unmanaged lands next to working plantations, which often grow oil palm, and are the primary driver of Indonesia’s high rates of deforestation and biodiversity loss. That means the fires were likely being used to clear the overgrowth to make room for more crops, he said.
Indonesia has faced terrible peat fire outbreaks since the 1990s, but began making strides to address the problem in the last decade. In 2014, it banned drainage canals used to dry out peatlands and make them more suitable for crops. And a couple of years later, after a particularly bad wildfire season, the government sharply curbed deforestation and began restoring large areas of already degraded land. The rate of deforestation continued to fall for five more years and, although it began creeping back up in 2022, remains far below what it once was.
“I was optimistic that the drought was inevitable but the fire was not,” said Field, adding that Indonesia was much more prepared for this year’s fires than in the past. “I don’t think there was a lack of sincerity from officials not wanting this to happen, and the fact that it did just points to how hard it is to manage fire in such a large and complicated country.”
Peat fires are an especially challenging form of wildfire for many reasons, said Israr Albar, Indonesia’s former deputy director of forest fire management, in an emailed statement. The dense buildup of organic material allows fires to burn underground for months, making them difficult to detect by satellite even as they release large amounts of carbon and smoke. (The smoke can become dense enough to obscure satellites from seeing fire on the surface, too.) “Just because we cannot see a fire does not mean it is not there,” Albar said.
This dynamic makes the flames hard to locate and put out, and even fires that seem extinguished will often reignite without notice. And it’s not always possible to find the large amounts of water necessary to put a peat fire out during the water-stressed conditions of the dry season. The country recently saw some rain, but “that doesn’t mean the danger has passed,” Albar said. “Even when the rainy season begins, fires may continue underground.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What’s fueling Indonesia’s worst wildfire season in a decade? on Oct 30, 2026.
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